ABSTRACT
As it advanced into Ukraine, the invading Russian military destroyed a number of war memorials, both deliberately and unintentionally. Some of the accidental damage was widely reported in the Ukrainian and international media. On March 1, 2022, the building of a planned museum at the Babyn Iar memorial site in Kyiv was damaged during Russian shelling of a nearby television tower. Babyn Iar, the site of one of the deadliest Nazi massacres of Jews and Roma, had been at the center of a protracted international controversy about a future memorial complex. 1 A menorah-shaped Holocaust memorial at the Drobyts’ky Iar execution site outside Kharkiv was likewise damaged by a Russian missile on March 26. Two days earlier, Russian artillery fire had hit Kharkiv’s largest memorial to the Great Patriotic War, the Memorial of Glory. 2 In Bucha, near Kyiv, Russian tanks shelled a Soviet-era armored vehicle installed on a pedestal as a memorial to the Soviet-Afghan war, mistaking it for a Ukrainian tank. 3 In the Donets’k region and in Hostomel’ near Kyiv, Russian shelling damaged several memorials to the Great Patriotic War, including at least one communal grave of Red Army soldiers. 4
