The Ukrainian government has adopted a new resolution to simplify the evacuation of more than three million pieces of cultural property from frontline zones. The move came days before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and as cultural institutions continue to grapple daily with the theft of—and damage to—museum objects.
“The resolution creates a more predictable, systematic, and secure model for protecting museum objects during war, combining clear rules, government accountability, and flexibility in crisis situations,” the culture ministry said in an announcement on 18 February.
Cultural activists have been demanding a comprehensive plan to safeguard Ukraine’s cultural heritage since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its museum and archaeological treasures in March 2014. Russia has since used Crimea to store museum pieces that it seized from Kherson, the city in southern Ukraine that it occupied for eight months after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A significant portion of the Kherson region is still illegally occupied by Russia.
“50km from the front line is now a clear zone for the mandatory evacuation of museum items,” Ukraine’s culture minister Tetyana Berezhna wrote in an 18 February Facebook post, which also addressed previous bureaucratic shortcomings that had paralysed the movement of cultural objects and created a logjam. Items must now be moved to at least 75km from the front, with clear and flexible procedures in place.
“The head of [an] institution has the right to act independently in case of a threat, without waiting for approval,” wrote Berezhna. “We are introducing a three-stage evacuation system, depending on the value of the property.”
Olha Sahaidak, the head of the Coalition of Cultural Actors, which had been persistently lobbying the ministry for changes and was involved in development of the resolution, tells The Art Newspaper about the losses that have driven these moves.
“At least 90 museums and about 1.7 million artefacts remain in the occupied territory, which Russia is gradually and systematically adding to the register of its own museum fund, effectively criminally appropriating our property, history, and culture,” she writes in an email.
Sahaidak says the evacuation process had ground to a halt in 2023-24 and the speed that this work is currently taking place—170,000 artefacts were evacuated in 2025—will not be “enough to secure the more than 3.5 million items that are in museum collections in frontline regions.”
According to Berezhna, 670,000 artefacts have been evacuated since the full-scale invasion.
Balancing priorities
The war required the government to address challenges “in all areas of life” simultaneously, says Sahaidak, which meant that “the issue of evacuation was not prioritised and addressed in a timely manner”. As a result, “evacuation priorities developed during the Soviet era were applied (they provided for the rescue of precious metal items first).”
Oleksandra Kovalchuk, the deputy director of the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum, a co-founder of the Odesa-based NGO Museum for Change, and a board member of the newly established Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Fund, was also a key player in putting the resolution to paper. Her organisation has helped 19 museums to evacuate objects to relative safety in western Ukraine and has calculated logistics and financing for the movement of museum objects.
“Usually, from our experience, to prepare 200 sq m for the storage of evacuated collections can cost about $40,000,” Kovalchuk told The Art Newspaper over Zoom in December. About 10,000-20,000 pieces can be stored in that amount of space, she said. Ukrainian museum exhibitions abroad have also become a means of safeguarding at least parts of collections.
According to Sahaidak, the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Fund, which will be headquartered in Brussels until the end of the war, is intended to serve as an international vehicle for “assisting museums in evacuating and preserving collections, equipping museum storage facilities, conserving and stabilising architectural monuments damaged during the war, and digitising cultural heritage.”
Sahaidak said that the evacuation resolution, while a welcome first step, “only regulates the handling of state museum collections”.
“Private collections and the collections of schools, universities, and businesses remain unregulated,” she added. “A comprehensive law is needed to regulate both the evacuation and preservation of evacuated collections, as well as the digitisation, restoration, and research of displaced items, etc.”
“But most importantly, we need weapons and military support to protect people and cities and to stop Russia's brutal crimes on our sovereign territory as soon as possible.”