Preserving Ukraine's Cultural Heritage

In February 2022, Russian forces began looting museum collections across occupied Ukraine. More than 2,000 works were taken from Mariupol alone — original Kuindzhi and Aivazovsky paintings, ancient icons, a handwritten Torah scroll. A year later, a federal law incorporated the collections of 77 Ukrainian museums into Russia’s state catalogue.

Ukraine’s records were not destroyed. They were scattered — across government registers, NGO databases, filing cabinets, photocopied inventory books, and archival microfilms. At least six disconnected systems, none talking to the others. Without structured, verified records of what existed before the occupation, legal recovery is impossible.

Years earlier, after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Vasyl Rozhko — then head of the Ministry’s Museum Department — launched a campaign to photocopy inventory books from museums across the country. Unglamorous, methodical, bureaucratic work. Today, that archive covers 647 museums. It is the broadest existing reference dataset for Ukrainian museum collections.

On February 20, 2026, the people who hold the scattered pieces sat in the same room for the first time. The archive. The 200,000 high-resolution images. The processing technology. The museum professionals who can verify every record. The government relationships. The legal connections. What had been separate efforts became a shared architecture — one processing layer connecting existing systems so that records become usable for restitution, sanctions enforcement, and Interpol submissions.

This work is separate from Bernard’s commercial product and operates under a dedicated structure with its own funding and resources. It stands on its own terms: humanitarian value, institutional usefulness, and the conviction that cultural memory, once lost, does not come back.