A museum in Kiev exhibits objects abandoned by Russian soldiers in the former occupied areas

On February 24, 2022, the day Russia staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Oleksandr Lukianov went to work, but it was no ordinary day at the office.

He and a small group of colleagues at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv, where he is a senior researcher, hastily began dismantling the exhibits, sending some objects to safer locations in the west of the country and storing others in basement. The group of curators ended up living in the building for two months.

At one point, he looked out the huge windows of the museum, which tower over the Dnipro valley, to see bursts of light in the sky: a Russian helicopter being hit. As the days passed, “we could hear the gunfire and the bangs coming from Irpin and Bucha,” he said, referring to the nearby towns that Russian forces occupied in the first weeks of the invasion.

Finally, the galleries, once filled with 20,000 objects from the museum’s collection of 800,000 objects, were empty. The finely wrought gold of the ancient nomadic people of the steppes, the great horsemen, the Scythians, had disappeared. Coins, manuscripts and maps had disappeared; ceramics from the old Greek colonies on the Black Sea had also disappeared.

“I thought it would never change,” he said, recalling the reassuringly immutable rooms of the museum where he had worked for seven years. “But here we are.”

And then he started to fill the museum again.

On April 7, 2022, in the sun of a warm spring day, Lukianov and a small team of colleagues set out for Irpin, from where the Russians had retreated a little more than a week before. Their mission: to collect new artifacts for the museum. “First the army came in, then there were legal experts – and then there were us,” he said.

The first thing they saw was a burnt Russian army vehicle, from which they recovered damaged helmets and goggles. “We were overexcited at this point – we took everything we could. But later we saw another, and another – so we started to be more selective,” he said.

The violence was terribly fresh. “I saw and smelled rotting corpses and saw unexploded devices,” he said. “But our curiosity overcame this – and so did our desire to seek history. The hardest thing was to see civilian cars that had been hit and to understand that people, including children, had certainly died in them.”

The objects Lukianov and his colleagues collected that day – including half-destroyed signs from a pharmacy, a Russian soldier’s boot, a 1970s dosimeter for measuring radiation levels as invasion convoys passed through Chornobyl and packages of Russian rations – now form the basis of an exhibition on the ground floor of the museum.

To the objects brought by the curators are added a series of artifacts donated by the military and the locals. Among them is a set of instructions, apparently issued to the occupying soldiers, on how to interact with the locals.

“If they ask you if you are Russian or Ukrainian, say, ‘We are both Russian and Ukrainian, and most importantly, we are all Orthodox Christians,'” the document suggests. “If they start arguing, talk about gay parades and the decay of orthodoxy… Never mention the word – if they ask you about the war, talk about the police and the local administration”.

Shortly thereafter, on April 23, 2023, Lukianov went on another collection mission – this time to a window factory near the town of Dymer, north of Kiev, which had been converted into a headquarters by the invading forces. The first thing that hit him, he said, was “a very strong smell of faeces – you couldn’t imagine how they lived there”.

Among the items in the factory are a discarded copy of the Russian newspaper Steaua Rosie, dated Wednesday, March 16, and, remarkably, a road atlas of Ukraine dating from 1975. They found photographs of women – girlfriends, wives – and the beginning of a letter to a loved one that began with “Hello, Zhenya, Now, there is no more…” and then ended.

Lukianov said it was important to collect the items as quickly as possible after the areas were cleared. It was the museum’s responsibility to preserve and store these vestiges of violence, as grim news passes into vital historical memory. “The sooner we do it, the better. By the time I left on the second mission, something had already been lost – things had been taken away from the local community and the army.”

The natural instinct was to start the cleanup operation as quickly as possible, he said. “People don’t want to keep things with negative memories. But it is our job, and the better we capture the situation now, the easier it will be for those who come after to research and understand this period.”

To mark the anniversary of the large-scale invasion, on February 24, the museum opened a new exhibition about last year’s devastating siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. “It’s a very emotional exhibition for us,” said museum guide Natalya Lykhytska. “Every day, the parents of those killed come and leave flowers here. There used to be Scythian artifacts in this hall – now it’s war, war, war.”

The museum’s latest exhibition, which opened in early April 2023, is about the village of Yahidne, on the outskirts of the city of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, where 368 residents were forced to stay in the cramped basement of the primary school for over a month, enduring terrible conditions while the invading Russians used the upper parts of the buildings as headquarters. The exhibition includes children’s drawings and toys, as well as a reproduction of the basement walls, on which those held there chalked the passing of days – and those who died.

There hasn’t been an opportunity for a collection trip for some time, but new donations are coming in every day. When visited by The Guardian, Lukianov had just received a cache of diaries kept by Ukrainians under Russian occupation – he hadn’t even had a chance to look at them yet.

“I studied history: when I was a student, it was easy to think that history happened to other people, at other times. Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history,” he said, referring to the American political scientist’s famous statement at the end of the Cold War. “He turned out to be wrong.”