For four years, Vitalina Martynovska and her team had been working on a complete transformation of Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum.
The new sleek displays were designed to tell a fresh story about the reactor explosion of 26 April 1986 – the most serious nuclear accident in history, a factor that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and an event that continues to shape Ukraine’s identity today.
The museum was to be devoted not just to the extraordinary work of the “liquidators” who did the initial cleanup after the explosion. It was also the story “of all the people whose lives changed after the disaster”, said Martynovska, the museum’s director.
It reopened to visitors on 26 April, 40 years to the day since the nuclear disaster.
Then, less than a month later, on the night of 23 May, a shock wave from a Russian missile engulfed the museum’s handsome historic building, a former fire station.
Five days later, a still profoundly shocked Martynovska was standing among the museum’s charred remains. Firefighters toiled amid the absolute destruction of everything she and her team had worked so hard to create.
“There is practically no room in the museum that has not suffered damage,” she said. “The building itself sustained significant damage, the roof was destroyed, the floor between the second and third storeys was destroyed, and collapsed; the exhibition rooms and the museum laboratory were affected.”
About 40% of the irreplaceable artefacts on display, according to early assessments, were destroyed.
Martynovska first heard that her building was on fire around 5am on 24 May. Through the night, Russia sent 60 missiles and 600 drones to Ukraine, most of which were targeted at the capital. The attack killed two people and injured 90 more and significantly damaged many of Kyiv’s museums and culturally significant buildings.
“Twenty minutes later, I was already there,” she said. “The first thing I saw was thick smoke and flames on the roof. The windows, doors and gates that were part of this building were already lying on the ground nearby.
“Given that I had been working on the restoration project with the team and on the project to build a new exhibition over the last four years, you can imagine what a heavy blow this was for me.”
As soon as the emergency workers allowed, she and the chief curator plunged into the building to try to save what they could. “We began evacuating the artefacts while the roof was still ablaze and the firefighting operation was still under way,” she said. “We could hear the roof collapsing. We were constantly wading through water.”
As she spoke, emergency workers were making safe a space that had housed a display about the Chornobyl area before the building of the power plant. The artefacts included old Bibles, books, icons and ceramics, most of which were destroyed. A text on the wall describing the room’s theme remained intact – translated, it read, “Lost worlds”.
The museum stores – housing the bulk of the collection of 22,000 artefacts – were safe, she said. And she had some hope that the 40% loss of artefacts on display may be revised down a little. She was clutching a pretty earthenware jug that the emergency workers had found in the blackened wreckage. They had also found, she said, the tail of a missile.
Across town, wind and rain were blowing into the elegant Doric-pedimented building housing the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Namu). Shock waves had blown out nearly all its windows, ceilings were partly down and panels from its huge wooden front doors had been flung across the foyer. The sculpture of Apollo that sits atop its pediment had cracked.
Its collection – ranging from ancient icons to old masters and Ukrainian modernists – is in storage or out on tour abroad. During the full-scale invasion, it has been hosting temporary exhibitions: the current show, titled Sunrise, of works by the 20th-century painter Anatoly Limarev, was protected from the onslaught of glass and debris by the temporary walls erected in the exhibition space, which acted as baffle walls. Since the attack, the exhibition has been hastily uninstalled and taken to safety.
In one of its elegant galleries, the head of exhibitions, a senior conservator and two students from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, attached to the institution for part of their art history degree, were shovelling rubble into carts.
“It’s definitely an internship they won’t forget,” said the museum spokesperson Veronika Bublei.
In the early morning of 24 May, she said, it was “stress, horrible – we were running about trying to do what we could and there was no time for emotion – or we turned the stress into trying to do something practical.
“It felt like the epicentre of a tempest, with all the doors and windows blown out – as if a tornado had blown through the building.”
“My initial feeling was one of shock,” said Namu’s director, Yulia Lytvynets, who, like the rest of her team, was dressed in workwear as the staff continued with the back-breaking cleanup operation on Thursday. “We understand that there is a war going on. Our halls are empty and our art is safe. But you’ll never be 100% ready for something like this. Even if you hide your collection, you can’t hide the building.”
The museum had been preparing its next exhibition devoted to the modernist theatre designer Anatol Petrytskyi. That will now go ahead online, she said. The building is now closed to the public indefinitely.
Numerous cultural buildings and institutions were reported damaged in the city after the night’s attacks, including the Zhytnyi market, a masterpiece of 1980s modernism.
It was the latest attack to damage cultural buildings and cultural heritage in the country. According to Ukraine’s culture ministry, the Russian army has “destroyed or damaged 1,723 cultural heritage sites and 2,524 cultural infrastructure sites in Ukraine” since 2022.
Fire had raged through a mall and market in the Lukianivka district of the city. At the Mala Opera, a performance venue across the street from the burned-out shopping mall, the venue’s chief technician, Oleksandr Buryma, was fitting plastic sheeting over blown-out windows as a temporary fix. The roof, he said, was damaged and a section of wall blown out at the rear.
But the early 20th-century venue, once a cultural centre for tram workers and now a beloved small-scale stage for theatre and music, was still planning to go ahead with its performance on the evening of 29 May: Railroad, a play by the US writer Bryan Reynolds set amid the rise of nazism, he said.
In this case, the show – if it possibly could – would go on.