Ukraine imposes new sanctions against Russia

Ukraine has imposed sanctions against the leadership of a number of leading Russian museum institutions due to their participation in the cultural occupation policy.

The Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications reported this.

The restrictions affected officials of the State Borodino Military History Museum-Reserve, the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the Peterhof Museum-Reserve, the Pushkin Museum, as well as the heads of institutions in Kulikovo Pole, Sviyazhsk, Tarkhany, Yasnaya Polyana and others.

The sanctions concern individuals involved in the illegal registration of Ukrainian cultural property in the Russian museum fund, visited the temporarily occupied territories after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, legitimize the occupation regime, participate in propaganda programs for children and publicly justify Russian aggression.

Acting Minister of Culture Tatyana Berezhnaya emphasized that Russian museums are involved in the large-scale theft of Ukrainian cultural heritage, in particular, by exporting artifacts, attempting to register them in Russian registries and systematically destroying Ukrainian cultural identity. Since 2014, the Russian Federation has been actively using the museum sphere as an instrument of occupation policy in Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. As of March 2025, the open catalog of the Russian museum fund already includes 39 museums from the territories of Ukraine occupied after 2022.

The sanctions also aim to prevent the election of Russian representatives to international cultural institutions, in particular to the governing bodies of ICOM. Artem Silkin and Galina Alekseyeva, both under Ukrainian sanctions, are running for the ICOM General Assembly, which will be held in Dubai in November. The next step will be to initiate similar restrictions at the level of the European Union.

Let us recall that on Sunday, July 27, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put into effect the decision of the National Security and Defense Council on the application of sanctions against individuals and legal entities associated with the Russian Federation.

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