They had survived Chernobyl itself. The objects that the Chernobyl National Museum of Kiev kept —the suits of the liquidators, their letters, the photographs of the exclusion zone, the files that for decades the Soviet Union kept secret— had gone through forty years to tell how the worst nuclear accident in history was managed, and how it was hidden. In the early hours of Sunday, a Russian missile turned about 40% of that archive into ashes.
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“Russia’s attack aimed not only to destroy lives, but also memory”, wrote President Volodymyr Zelensky on Telegram, confirming that the lost pieces are unrecoverable.
A worker inside the Chernobyl National Museum, where “not a single room was left undamaged”, according to its director; Sunday’s attack destroyed 40% of the exhibits on display. One of the exhibition halls of the Chernobyl National Museum, covered in debris after the attack; the fire collapsed the roof and floors between the third and second levels (Ministry of Culture of Ukraine) The missile hit at 3:50 a.m., according to video recordings captured by Yaroslav Yemelianenko, director of the Chernobyl Tourism Operators Association, who filmed two missiles flying over the historic St. Sophia Cathedral heading towards the historic Podil neighborhood, where the museum is located. The attack unleashed a large-scale fire that destroyed the roof and collapsed part of the back wall of the third exhibition hall. We recommend reading:Russian missiles flying over the historic Podil district and hitting the Chernobyl Museum
The destruction has a symbolic weight that is hard to ignore: the museum had reopened its doors on April 27, 2026, just a month ago, after an extensive restoration scheduled to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.“The museum disappeared. This is not accidental: they are deliberately targeting our history,” said Yemelianenko.
Save What You Can
A worker removes a damaged piece from the Chernobyl National Museum; among the rescued items are a painting by Maria Prymachenko and the flag raised at the plant after its evacuation in 2022. When the flames subsided, the staff began to rescue what remained. Among the salvaged items are materials from the warehouses, a painting by Maria Prymachenko and the Ukrainian flag raised at the Chernobyl plant after its evacuation by Russian forces in 2022. Workers were rescuing objects belonging to the Chernobyl liquidators – the hundreds of thousands of people mobilized to contain and clean up the radiation after the accident – and drying historical embroideries among the rubble. In an adjacent building, with the windows blown out by the blast wave, the authorities arrested a looter. Employees of the Chernobyl National Museum dry rescued objects after the attack: among the rubble, workers cleaned belongings of the liquidators and historical embroideries. A worker cleans the interior of the Chernobyl National Museum, opened in 1992 in a former fire station in the historic Podil district.The internal destruction was almost total. “As of today, there is not a single room in the Chernobyl National Museum that has not been destroyed. Our third floor practically disappeared. The ceilings between the third and second floors collapsed,” described to Reuters the director of the museum, Vitalina Martynovska.
According to preliminary estimates, 40% of the pieces on display were lost, although a large part of the collection was saved. “I want to trust that we will still find some objects trapped under the collapsed plaster structures,” he added. Interior of the Chernobyl National Museum after the bombing on Sunday, one of the few in the world dedicated to the nuclear catastrophe, comparable only to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The museum, opened in 1992 in a historic building of a former fire station in the Podil district, was a rarity on a global scale. It preserved archives, photographs, personal belongings of the liquidators, and multimedia installations about the 1986 accident. Another of the damaged museum halls, with a ripped-off door and shattered glass; the windows burst due to the shock wave, which also reached neighboring buildings (Ministry of Culture of Ukraine) For Mariana Budjeryn, a senior researcher at the Nuclear Security Policy Center of the Security Studies Program at MIT and of Ukrainian origin, it was one of the few places on the planet entirely dedicated to the impact of the misuse of nuclear energy on human life, comparable only to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.“It’s a huge loss for Ukraine and for the world”, he wrote on LinkedIn.
