‘It felt like a tempest’ Toll on Kyiv’s cultural jewels after airstrike

For four years, Vitalina Martynovska and her team had been working on a complete transformation of Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum.

- Charlotte Higgins, Mariana Matveichuk

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 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 at about 5am on 24 May. Throughout 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 but also significantly damaged many of Kyiv’s museums and culturally significant buildings.