We turn into a narrow stairway, following unremarkable signs pointing the way to the museum’s ukrittya, its bomb shelter. He leaves me with Dmytro Hainetdinov, the head of the museum’s education department, to finish the tour. ‘Will they come back? Will they be fighting again? How long will it be?’”Īt this juncture, Savchuk takes his leave - he has to prepare for a ceremony accepting a donation of archival documents that shed light on the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War - but there’s one more exhibit he wants me to see. We (didn’t) know what will be in the future. It was 2nd of April this region had liberation. “Because we prepared our exhibition only one month (after the war started). “It was fantastically difficult, very hard,” Savchuk says - especially, he adds, given the conditions. So how hard was it to work track this specific wreckage down? 24, along with thousands of other mechanized weapons. Ukraine is littered with junk like this now: Ukraine’s defence ministry claims to have destroyed over 220 helicopters since Feb. Suddenly, another question popped into my mind. It’s an exhibition in dialogue not just with the violence of war, but how that violence is consumed.įragments of a helicopter shot down in March. #GOOD REAL WAR SAYS OUR NOSTALGIA HOW TO#It made a revealing statement, about how the museum - and Ukraine as a whole, by extension - is negotiating how to claim ownership of the way its brutalization plays out in the eyes of the world. The fact the museum had sought this debris struck me as significant. By that time I had seen many such broken Russian weapons in Ukraine, but to see this was surreal: the armchair experience of observing the war as media, colliding with real life. I blinked, first to come to terms with the fact that these scraps of metal belonged to that exact helicopter. I remembered the video well it had flown across Twitter. (It landed on a civilian’s house, destroying it luckily, the man had left just minutes earlier and survived.) Now, the fragments of that aircraft hang in the museum, beside a video screen showing the looping record of its demise. In March, a video had gone viral, showing Ukraine’s forces shooting down a Russian helicopter in a particularly spectacular fashion. The door belonged to a church in the village of Peremoha. The entrance into one of the exhibition halls is a heavy door tattered by shrapnel. Inside are bits and pieces of religious artifacts, and something more unusual. We enter through a heavy metal door tattered by shrapnel, which belonged to a church in the village of Peremoha - a name which, in a bittersweet twist, means “victory” - that had been blitzed into rubble. Savchuk takes me upstairs, to show me the next part of the exhibition. “Everybody finds for themselves an answer for this question.” “I haven’t one answer for this question,” he says. I ask him what he sees as the value of showing these items. Savchuk gestures to it, with a trace of sadness. The photo attached must have been an old one the boy in it is no more than a child. A trove of Russian credit cards spread out on a transport case that once held a rocket.Ītop the case sits a passport from the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, of a soldier who is - was? - just 19 years old. On the first floor, a collection of items left behind by Russian soldiers: cans of peas, thermoses, boxes of rations. Most of them are mundane, some are dramatic, and a handful are famous. What those visitors find is a striking but understated collection of objects. Yurii Savchuk, director of the National Museum of Ukraine In the Second World War, gestures at a collection of Russian credit cards and documents found in the Kyiv region after the occupation. Since then, the museum has hosted a steady stream of diplomats and dignitaries, and a slew of curious journalists. Others would follow, including a digital exhibit memorializing children lost to the war. Just over a month later, the museum, which sprawls over a green hillside above the Dnipro River, opened its first exhibition related to the current invasion. It was a record they were determined to gather as soon as possible. But they also got a sense of the record the war had left behind, both in its objects and as inscribed on survivors’ minds. For 10 days they documented the region, taking over 1,700 photos which would eventually form a touring exhibition. KYIV - In early April, just three days after Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Yurii Savchuk, general director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, rounded up a photographer and drove north, into the wreckage of communities that fan out from the capital, still littered then with mines and parts of dead people.
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