Charlotte Higgins

Cleaning us up and the repairing it and the trying to go on and just hard to watch people absorbing all that into their lived lives.

I think it's very hard to unravel, actually, Annie.

I mean, who can look into the minds of Putin and his army chiefs and say, what were they actually aiming at?

I mean, clearly, sometimes they're aiming at military targets and they might hit a museum.

But the fragments of Shahad missiles were actually found and seen amid...

the wreckage of the roof of the Dormition Cathedral, which led the Ukrainian government to assert that the area was actually targeted.

The Russian government claimed, by contrast, that the damage to the cathedral related to air defence, but that seems not to be the case.

The result is exactly the same, whatever the intention was.

If those attacks are successful and something is obliterated and something is lost, then that's removing a layer of memory from the culture.

That's a sort of irrecoverable loss then, and you have to decide whether you're going to try and rebuild it, whether you're going to try and put something else in its place or how you're going to keep the memory of it.

And all of these things, you know, what to do when something is destroyed, that's a kind of really live debate in Ukraine.

There have been extraordinary and remarkable efforts to safeguard as much as possible.

But some of these efforts took place quite late in the game.

If you remember back to 2022 and the beginning of the war, Ukraine's government hadn't made any evacuation orders for museums towards the front line, for example.

There are lots of reasons and political reasons for that, but that's how it was.

So a lot of museums were evacuated during the full scale invasion when the bombs were already falling.

So I remember going to the National Historical Museum in Kiev and saying,

talking to the people there, and they were taking objects off display when they could see Russian helicopters flying outside the windows.

Living in that museum for a month at the beginning of the full-scale invasion to get everything down into the basement and ultimately to safety.

So it's been a very mixed picture of people self-organising in a remarkable way to safeguard objects.