Barely the Russian troops withdrawn from the Ukrainian capital to concentrate on the Donbass region, the museums of kyiv exhibit the remains of their passage. An unprecedented step for a country still in the throes of war.
Carcasses of armored vehicles, tank turrets, Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft in pieces… The Military History Museum of Ukraine has collected, in the street, some of the Russian equipment captured following the clashes in the region of kyiv. Inside the building, objects, sometimes brought back by soldiers, testify to the presence of the attackers in the region. “Many soldiers had been here before, so they knew where to bring the items they found,” Oleksandr Shemelyak, senior researcher at the museum, told the Guardian. He continues: “We are constantly receiving new objects to exhibit”.
On the other side of kyiv, at the Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, a larger exhibition has opened. More than a hundred pairs of Russian army boots arranged in the heart of a red star form a true work of art amid hundreds of objects collected by museum staff “three days after liberation” in the early April, Dmytro Hainetdinov, head of the museum’s education department, told the Guardian. They thus recovered “passports, bank cards and other personal effects of Russian soldiers” reports the Guardian. But also “a map of the left bank of kyiv, with police stations and other strategic points carefully marked using a color code”.
On Facebook, the museum announced on Tuesday May 24 that it had recovered carcasses of armored vehicles “imbued with the vile spirit of war” to be exhibited in kyiv.
Preserving these objects for posterity is important to the museum, but the exhibition also aims to show the horror of the occupation to Ukrainians who have not experienced it. “A lot of people left for safer places and are coming back today, and luckily they didn’t have to experience these things firsthand,” Dmytro Hainetdinov said. “It’s a project that shows what happens when the lessons of history are not learned,” he concludes.
However, war is never far away. The museum also specifies its security measures on its Facebook page: in the event of an air attack, visitors can take refuge inside the building where seats and bottles of water are at their disposal.
