Charlotte Higgins

So on the same day as I went to the Chernobyl Museum, I also went to the National Museum of Fine Art, basically the National Gallery of Ukraine.

It's a classic museum in that it looks like a Greek temple.

It's really, really beautiful.

They evacuated their collection several years ago.

But inside that building, the building was just full of broken glass and rubble.

And one of the chief conservators, the head of the curatorial team and two interns who were there to do their practical art history experience, they were there with shovels in clouds of dust, shoveling rubble into carts.

And the director said to me, you know, you can be sort of mentally prepared for it, and yet you're just not really prepared for it when it happens.

Well, actually, Annie, I honestly thought they would never hit this site.

particular monastery, because this monastery was founded in the 11th century by monks who came from Mount Athos and founded this, what became eventually a complex, a whole complex of churches, monastery, now it's museums, kind of cultural and religious territory.

It's a spectacular group of buildings, you know, with golden domes that...

you know, the sheen of them as the sun rises.

It's extraordinary.

And it is precious throughout the Eastern Orthodox world, including in Russia, right?

Everything about it is both sort of sanctified in a religious sense, but also of huge cultural importance and huge historical importance.

It was awful, really, to see the footage of flames and smoke pouring out of the Pechesk Lavra was very disturbing.

The emergency services worked really hard in Kiev, but you can't catch absolutely everything.

And I think they did limit the damage, but it's just very hard to wrap one's head around the significance of these events.

And it's not like the city's being destroyed in one night.

It's not like the British carpet bombing Hamburg, precisely.

It's this cumulative damage and the rubble and the mess and the...