Article by Elise Bernard* in the magazine Inflections N°62, dossier « Without lying“, May 2026. Published in Carte Blanche in the newsletter ofChallenges “Full of Ideas.” To register, click here.
The United Nations Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed in The Hague on May 14, 1954 and ratified by one hundred and thirty-six states, defines cultural property as including “monuments of architecture, art or history, archaeological sites, groups of buildings of historical or artistic interest, works of art, manuscripts, books, scientific collections and buildings which preserve movable cultural property, such as museums, libraries and archives ”.
Today, this text unfortunately pales in comparison to the scale of the aggressive influence strategy pursued by the Kremlin in Ukraine. On April 16, 2025, UNESCO indicated that four hundred and ninety-four sites have been damaged since February 24, 2022: one hundred and forty-nine religious buildings, thirty-four museums, two hundred and fifty-seven historical and/or artistic buildings, thirty-three monuments and eighteen libraries, an archive center and two archaeological sites.
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A month earlier, on March 12, 2025, during a round table on the question of preserving heritage in conflict zones organized as part of the Paris Defence and Strategy Forumone of the speakers, a “contact soldier” of the Blue Shield, confirmed that international conventions are not respected, that their invocation on the ground has no effect. He explained this by the fact that the Russian aggressor seeks to erase all traces of a Ukrainian identity. However, until then, this situation had not been envisaged and had therefore not been planned.
The intellectual negation of Ukrainian identity does not stop at these interpretations. In October 2021, in Mariupol, the monument to the victims of the Holodomor, the great famine orchestrated by the Soviet Union which left several million dead in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, was dismantled as part of a “policy aimed at removing from public space the symbols of past events and preventing the appearance of narratives that differ» of the official Russian discourse on these events, as explained in 2016Â the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.
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Under the pretext of “denazification, de-Ukrainization, both physical and cultural, involves the elimination of all those who refuse the idea that Ukraine constitutes a simple region of a larger Russia“. Thus, in the context of the armed conflict, the Kremlin seems determined to harm Ukrainian cultural heritage, going so far as to destroy it to annihilate its tangible manifestations.
Unfortunately, there is still a step missing before establishing in the law of armed conflict that the attack on tangible cultural property constitutes a crime against an intangible identity. Certainly, responsibility is admitted in international criminal law thanks to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the convictions handed down. However, these only apply, following a complex investigation, to those responsible individually and by name. An arrest warrant can therefore be issued for war crimes, but there is no guarantee that those responsible will be arrested, tried, convicted and punished on this basis.
« The memory of humanity is also “memory of stone and earth”, of places and objects, the trace of which deserves to be preserved. What we think of as our common heritage must be able to remain, because it is about us, not just our assets.» Marie Cornu, « The hope of intangibility in the life of the works” Quarterly Civil Law Review2007.
The observation is bitter. Conflict law does not yet clearly recognize the dialectic between the tangible and the intangible of an identity. However, she knows examples from past armed conflicts. The striking example of the Russian Federation’s attack on Ukraine pushes us to rethink the law, old and new practices, whether in acts of hostility intentionally targeting heritage and cultural property or when the latter suffer collateral damage. Thus, the armies are called upon to organize themselves accordingly. /…/
The rest of this article can be read in the new issue of the magazine Inflexions (n°62 “Without lying”, May 2026). To order from your bookseller or directly from the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme by email: cid@msh-paris.fr. And here in digital version.
*Elise Bernard is a doctoral student and production coordinator at La revue Hermès.
