THE ART RESCUERS

When Russia invaded, a historian in Kyiv saw that Ukraine's art heritage was in danger. So he set out to save as much of it as he could

-  Charlotte Higgins

In early March 2022, when his country seemed in danger of falling to the Russians, it occurred to Leonid Marushchak, a historian by training, to call the director of a museum in eastern Ukraine to check that a collection of 20th-century studio pottery was safe.

He had loved the modernist works by artist Natalya Maksymchenko since he had encountered them almost a decade earlier. There were vessels covered with bold abstract glazes in purple, scarlet and yellow; exuberant figurines of musicians and dancers with swirling skirts; dishes painted with birds in flight. The collection was the radiant highlight of the local history museum in Sloviansk, the ceramicist's home town.

It was remarkable that they were in this small museum at all. Though she was born in Ukraine in 1914 and studied in Kharkiv, Maksymchenko had lived the rest of her life in Russia. But, after her death in 1978, her family, fulfilling her wishes, oversaw the transfer of about 400 works from her studio in Moscow to the city of her birth. It was a deeply resonant act. When the historic traffic of artworks has so often been from Ukraine to Russia, when artists' national allegiances have been subsumed by the Soviet Union, when works in international museums by Ukrainians (such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich) have been routinely labelled "Russian", Maksymchenko's final gift to her home town and country seemed like a statement of defiance.

Now, as the Russian army inched nearer and nearer to the museum, Marushchak worried that these works in delicate porcelain could be destroyed by a missile in a moment - or, if Sloviansk were occupied, taken by the invaders back to Moscow. Had the ceramics been prioritised for the first round of evacuations, Marushchak asked the museum director on the phone.

"Lyonya, what round?" came the reply. "We still haven't got the order to evacuate!"