Under Fire Heritage of Ukraine: some insights from early damage assessment activity
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Date
2025
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Cultural heritage sites have been increasingly destroyed within conflict areas around the world, both as collateral damage of action of bombing and shelling and as result of deliberate targeting. Qualitative and quantitative assessments of the damage that conflicts are inflicting to the heritage of countries involved in bombings and shelling have been conducted by archaeologists both on the ground and with the help of aerial datasets. In this paper we would like to present the initiative of a pilot assessment of the damage perpetrated to monuments and heritage locations in Ukraine during the Russian invasion of the country in March 2022. In this case, the aerial and ground assessments were conducted during the ongoing conflict and the paper will elucidate the positive and negative implications that this had on the investigation. The pilot study was a collaboration between a group of Ukrainian archaeologists from various institutions, the University College London, and the Global Heritage Fund, where team members with different expertise joined forces to documents the damage to Ukrainian heritage in the cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv. An agreement with Planet Labs allowed the team to have access to weekly satellite coverage of the two cities, thus providing for a detail tracking of the patterns of destruction occurring during the initial phases of the military invasion. Meanwhile, a team of archaeologists conducted a ground damage assessment of heritage buildings and monuments within the two urban areas. The combination of the two sets of data, aerial monitoring and ground assessment, led to a more complete picture of the overall destruction and also allowed to clarify whether the heritage assets affected by bombing and shelling were the result of collateral damage or were indeed deliberately targeted. The results show that in Kharkiv the most affected monuments are located in the areas of the city that were primarily hit, whereas in Chernihiv they were specifically targeted in order to allegedly strike the heritage and identity of the Ukrainian people.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:dh.20253067,
booktitle = {Digital Heritage},
editor = {Campana, Stefano and Ferdani, Daniele and Graf, Holger and Guidi, Gabriele and Hegarty, Zackary and Pescarin, Sofia and Remondino, Fabio},
title = {{Under Fire Heritage of Ukraine: some insights from early damage assessment activity}},
author = {Nebbia, Marco and Jorayev, Gai},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-277-6},
DOI = {10.2312/dh.20253067}
}