'Have we done enough?': Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene on preserving Ukraine's cultural heritage

On 24 February, we are entering the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Taking a long collective look at the unfolding destruction of multicultural heritage in Ukraine has been a difficult yet invaluable lesson in civic and humanitarian responsibilities in academia and beyond. I am honoured to have met and collaborated with people within and outside King’s willing to do something about it.

In 2022 and 2023, I co-curated the fundraising KCL Films for Ukraine screenings of films about and of Ukraine in collaboration with Professor Chris Berry from the Department of Film Studies, the Lithuanian cultural attaché Ūla Tornau, the Ukrainian Institute London, independent producer Alla Dryzhak, architecture historian Jenia Gubkina, Teodosia Dobriyanova of New East Cinema, and many others.

Hosting Hanna Bilobrova as a co-director of Mariupolis 2 at our 2023 UK premiere with the Barbican was one of them. From besieged Mariupol, Hanna brought the body of her partner and filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius back home to Lithuania. With the Paris-based editor Dounia Sichov, she completed the film for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it garnered the jury’s Special Award but was screened without Hanna’s name in the credits.

In March 2024, together with my brilliant students of the Curating and Preserving Digital Culture module, we organised the Un.censor.ing conference for scholars, artists, and activists to share their experiences of uncovering difficult and often conflicting memories from across time and space. The event was followed by the screenings of short films about censorship or of once-censored films. The double-bill of Peñoncito by Colombian filmmaker Manuel Correa and What Shall We Do with These Buildings? by Jonathan Ben-Shaul put Mexico City and Kharkiv into dialogue and shed light on different cultural legacies and their erasure.

According to UNESCO, the number of verified heritage damages in Ukraine includes 519 cultural sites, as of February 2026.

Last year, I had the honour to curate the exhibition Ukraine: Architectures of Despair and Hope for the European Parliament in the UK. Along with war photography, it featured the 3D work of Skeiron, the team of young professionals from Lviv, for whom the exhibition was another opportunity to share Ukrainian culture with the world.

In the pre-exhibition podcast for London Calling EU and her opening speech, Cross Bench Peer Baroness Deborah Bull CBE reminded us that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a violation of human rights. The systematic Russian efforts to rewrite Ukraine’s history have global repercussions, as in creating an amusement park at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tauric Chersonese in occupied Crimea, causing damage to original Greek, Roman and Byzantine archaeological layers.

Through these activities, I have witnessed the degree to which international students at King’s care about global heritage and want to make a real impact. What's lacking, though, is a connection to real-world experiences in the process of learning. Thus emerged the idea to create The Global Digital Citizenship / Digital Cultural Curation of Global Heritage Internship in the summer of 2025. I am grateful for the generosity of CEO Darrel Butlin of Hexology and Oksana Yarema, our visiting scholar from Ukraine, who guided and supported students from London, Edinburgh, and Ternopil, Ukraine, in their memory-making of places and people they care about.

As part of the internship, Yustyna Prystupa, a student of History and Archaeology at the Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University in Ukraine, wrote a heartfelt series of blog posts titled We are Ukrainian. In the series, she focused on the life stories of Ukrainian artists, writers and heroes who fell victim to Soviet censorship and oppression.

Among other stories, Yustyna wrote about Alla Horska, the Ukrainian painter and monumental artist, harassed and threatened throughout her short lifetime by the Soviet regime. Her artistic heritage, including the in-situ mosaics in Mariupol, was once again subjected to erasure years after her death, when the Russian military razed Mariupol in eighty days in 2022. This is a heavy burden of memory for our future generations to bear.

We will talk about this experience at the Victoria and Albert Museum conference ‘Ukrainian Cultural Heritage and UK Institutions: Shifting Perspectives and Practice’ in September 2026, and more similar events are coming.

But have we done enough to create a sense of urgency and mobilise our communities on the privileged side of security to respond to the ongoing geopolitical crises?

With Ukraine’s civil and cultural infrastructure under the brutal shelling in the exceptionally cold winter this year, in hindsight, I am inclined to put the titular word ‘hope’ inside parentheses as a reminder of more work that lies ahead of us.

Main image: Destroyed Trinity Church located in the village of Mala Komyshuvakha, Kharkiv Region, January 2026. Credit: Mykhaylo Palinchak via Shutterstock.