Unesco, which opens this Sunday, September 10, the 45th expanded convention of the World Heritage Committee, approved a request from Ukraine to add 20 historical monuments to the international list of cultural heritage sites under enhanced protection, while Ukrainian heritage has also suffered since the start of the Russian invasion.
1 min
With our correspondent in kyiv, Emmanuelle Chaze
In Ukraine, historical monuments and cultural heritage are not spared from the war. Since the start of the large-scale invasion of the country, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has documented more than 1,600 cultural sites damaged or destroyed by Russian forces.
Among the most notable are buildings in the historic center of Odessa, recently listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is to protect what can still be protected that Ukraine has asked UNESCO to include 20 other monuments on the international list of sites placed under enhanced protection, including wooden churches in the Carpathian region. , the historic center of Lviv as a whole – the medieval part has already been under protection since the 1990s –, the tomb of the poet Taras Shevchenko, the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv, the first skyscraper built in the Soviet Union, and the monastery in Kiev of Pechersk Lavra as well as the Saint Sophia Cathedral.
According to the protection mechanism put in place by UNESCO, any person who does not respect this reinforced protection status is exposed to criminal sanctions. The intentional destruction of protected sites may constitute a war crime.
Read alsoUkraine: war caused billions of euros in destruction of heritage, according to UNESCO