Russia’s Kinetic Destruction of Ukraine’s Cultural Memory

On the night of May 23-24, a Russian aerial attack involving 600 drones and 90 missiles bombarded Kyiv, Ukraine. Cultural institutions and architectural landmarks were damaged, some severely, including the Hinaus gallery, the Zhytnii Market, the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the National Chornobyl Museum, the Ukrainian House, and the Kyiv Small Opera.

Cultural artifacts and institutions are civilian objects under international humanitarian law (IHL) unless they are being used for military purposes and are thus supposed to be immune from attack. However, cultural property receives added protection under the 1954 Hague Convention and its additional protocols (see Articles 1, 5, 7, and especially 9 of the 1954 Hague Convention, supplemented by Article 53 of Additional Protocol I and Article 16 of Additional Protocol II). The preamble to the Hague Convention notes that damage to cultural property constitutes “damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind.” The Russian Federation is a party to these agreements, so unless documentation shows that such facilities were serving military purposes, attacks on them constitute violations of IHL.

But the attack on the National Chornobyl Museum is more than just a legal violation. By destroying or irreparably damaging a large number of the museum’s exhibits and leaving the building itself in ruins, the strike also produced information effects—demonstrating a Russian mode of warfare in which physical destruction can yield long-term cognitive, symbolic, and narrative effects.

The National Chornobyl Museum is not simply a repository of industrial artifacts from a nuclear accident. It is a public institution that preserves objects, testimony, and interpretation and thereby anchors a durable account of the 1986 disaster (the 40th anniversary of which passed in April), one that in Ukraine carries deep political weight because it records not only Soviet technological failure but also secrecy, administrative rigidity, and indifference to civilian protection.

This is precisely why the strike deserves to be analyzed in terms broader than conventional battlefield effects or even the destruction of other cultural artifacts. A missile that destroys landmarks such as a museum does not simply remove a structure from the urban landscape. It also damages an institution that helps anchor a society’s understanding of historical responsibility, state legitimacy, and national endurance.

An information battle has long been recognized as an element of adversarial conflict and competition, including in times of war. But as a point of departure for understanding Russian actions against the Chornobyl National Museum, it helps to start with the U.S. perspective. Issued in 2012, Joint Publication 3-13 defined information operations as “the integrated employment, during military operations, of IRCs [information-related capabilities] in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.” Later, JP 3-13 was superseded by Joint Publication 3-04, which broadened the focus to operations in the information environment, defined as “military actions involving the integrated employment of multiple information forces to affect drivers of behavior by informing audiences, influencing foreign relevant actors, [and] attacking and exploiting relevant actor information systems.” That broader doctrine is useful because it shifts attention from decision-making alone to will, awareness, and understanding. It also makes clear that operations in the information environment are not confined to wartime in the narrow sense; they can occur at any time.

In contrast, Russian strategic thought places more emphasis on continuous information confrontation, reflexive control, and cognitive influence. In that view, information is treated not merely as background noise or a supplementary domain, but as a central arena in which perceptions, expectations, and choices are shaped. The practical implication is that Russian analysts and practitioners often appear to be less interested in persuading an adversary of a single claim than in shaping the adversary’s interpretive environment—what counts as salient, credible, or thinkable. Recent work on Russian cognitive warfare continues this line of analysis, stressing that influence operations aim to alter the conditions under which opponents understand events, assess risk, and make decisions.

In that sense, the separation between the physical and the informational is somewhat artificial. Indeed, physical violence has long had communicative functions in war. For example, a British major general noted that “[w]e conduct all operations in order to influence people and events, to bring about change, whether by 155mm artillery shells or hosting visits: these are all influence operations. We sought to make use of every lever we had to influence events.” But kinetic operations also produce physical destruction of assets, and attacks must be directed only against military objectives under IHL, meaning objects that, by their nature, location, purpose, or use, make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

In the case of physical attacks on religious sites, libraries, monuments, and archives, their destruction obtains no military advantage. Instead, such acts serve punitive ends—including intimidation, delegitimation, humiliation, and the demonstration of raw power over a community’s defining narratives. In the current media environment, these communicative effects are amplified globally within minutes, rapidly becoming inputs into diplomatic, legal, and political narratives.

The Chornobyl Museum strike fits this logic. It is best understood not as proof of a single all-encompassing doctrine of memory erasure, but as an instance in which a kinetic act predictably generated strategically useful information effects. The attack produced a visual and political narrative of vulnerability, transmitted evidence of cultural destruction to international audiences, and struck a site associated with a particularly damaging memory of Soviet failure. Because the pathologies exposed by Chornobyl also resonate with the behavior and logic of today’s Russia, the strike can also be read as an attack on a narrative central to contemporary Ukrainian identity and resistance.

In that sense, the strike fits a broader logic of memory warfare, which refers to efforts to shape how a population understands its past by targeting the institutions, symbols, and records that preserve that past for the public. Those methods include propaganda, curricular revision, and archive suppression, as well as attacks on culturally resonant sites.

From a Russian perspective, targeting a museum that links Soviet governance to catastrophe, secrecy, and human suffering can be useful even if it does not fully erase the underlying memory, because it imposes a concrete loss on an institution of remembrance and signals contempt for the historical frame it sustains. The attack on the museum is best understood as a particularly violent form of denial, much as neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust: not by erasing facts themselves so much as by undermining the legitimacy of the memory that keeps it public.

That understanding should not be overstated. Physical destruction does not automatically produce forgetting. In some cases, it produces the opposite effect: heightened attention, outrage, international solidarity, and a hardening of the attacked community’s sense of identity. The point is not that Russia can easily delete history by striking a museum. The takeaway is that such a strike can still operate within a broader contest over memory by damaging a symbolic site, creating new images for circulation, and pressuring the institutions that carry historical narrative forward.

The immediate consequence of the strike was material damage. But material damage is only the first-order effect. Second-order effects include fear, anger, and the perception that not only Ukraine’s cities and citizens but also its historical memory are under attack. Those effects matter because wars are fought not only over territory but also over legitimacy, endurance, and a population’s ability to maintain a coherent understanding of what it is defending.

Three such effects are especially relevant. First, the strike has a domestic psychological effect: It reinforces the sense that Russia is willing to target institutions of public memory as well as population centers and infrastructure. Second, it has an international effect: Cultural destruction is highly legible to outside audiences and often carries stronger moral resonance than attacks on less symbolically loaded facilities. Third, the strike works against preservation of cultural and historical memory: Even when records survive elsewhere, damage to a museum weakens a public venue where history is curated, taught, and materially encountered.

These are information effects that shape perception, structure interpretation, and influence the stories told about the war. They require acknowledging that information effects can arise from physical attacks on symbolic institutions and that modern war often collapses categories analysts prefer to keep separate.

The term “gaslighting” originates from the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight,” in which a husband systematically manipulates his wife into believing she is losing her sanity by secretly dimming gas lamps in their home and denying that the light is changing. Interpersonally, gaslighting is a form of psychological attack designed to destabilize the victim’s confidence in memory, perception, and interpretation of reality, and it exerts coercive pressure that makes the victim less secure in publicly asserting or trusting their own interpretations and truth claims.

Similarly, a strike on a museum tied to historical wrongdoing is not just an attack on a building; it is an attack on memory itself. It signals that preserving, curating, or narrating that past is risky, illegitimate, and punishable, and the Chornobyl museum strike fits that logic as a form of memory coercion akin to gaslighting rather than simple destruction. It need not erase the past completely to do damage; it only needs to make remembrance feel more vulnerable, more contested, and more dangerous.

Was the attack on the museum really an example of Russian information warfare in action? Without knowing the motives of those who ordered and planned the attack, it is impossible to know for sure. Not every strike is the direct execution of a perfectly coherent doctrine, and not every symbolic effect documents a singular strategic intention. But without turning our understanding of Russian information warfare into an all-purpose explanatory template, we can safely make three statements.

First, Russia has repeatedly conducted attacks that damage culturally significant sites in Ukraine. Second, such attacks predictably generate communicative and psychological effects that bear on memory, legitimacy, and identity. Third, the Chornobyl Museum strike is consistent with a broader style of warfare in which those effects are not incidental but strategically useful. That formulation is narrower than the claim that Russia sought to erase history once and for all.

The policy implications are straightforward. Cultural infrastructure should not be treated as peripheral to national security. Museums, archives, memorials, and libraries are repositories of political meaning as well as heritage, and attacks on them can have strategic effects that extend well beyond the immediate damage. For that reason, states supporting Ukraine should treat the protection and replication of historical records as part of resilience planning.

That means rapid documentation after attacks, digital backup of vulnerable collections, off-site storage when possible, and international preservation partnerships capable of reducing the long-term informational consequences of physical destruction. It also means using more precise analytical language. The strongest argument is not that every cultural strike proves a grand design of memory annihilation. It is that physical attacks on symbolic institutions can function as instruments of coercive signaling, identity contestation, and narrative warfare in modern conflict.

The Chornobyl Museum strike therefore deserves attention not because it settles every question about Russian doctrine, but because it shows how the destruction of a physical site can reverberate through the cognitive and political dimensions of war. The strike was in Kyiv, but the effects radiate outward into questions of memory, legitimacy, and historical responsibility that are central to Ukraine’s struggle and to how outside audiences understand it.