Russia squeezes blood from stone in Ukraine Opinion by Bloomberg

Bloomberg has published an opinion piece stating that an attack on Lviv underscores the fragility of the country’s cultural legacy — and how revenge has a very long afterlife. Caliber.Az reprints this article. 

In one year of war, the Russian onslaught in Ukraine destroyed an estimated $50 billion in housing and much more than that in roads, factories and commercial property. But there may be no measure for the cost of another category of physical damage.

A shudder went through the soul of Ukraine on July 6 after a missile hit Lviv — a storehouse of the country’s history — killing 10 people and destroying a nearly 100-year-old apartment building on the cusp of a zone designated for cultural protection by Unesco. What if the attack had gone just a bit further? 

Among the treasures that would have been in peril: the rococo Cathedral of St. George — a seat of Ukraine’s Orthodox church as well as a symbol of anti-Soviet patriotism; the Korniakt palace, which was built in the style of an Italian palazzo in the late 16th century; and Rynok Square, where about 40 buildings, some dating from the Renaissance, bear witness to the country’s convoluted political and mercantile past. There are more than 2,000 historical landmarks in the 300 acres of Lviv’s old city centre. 

Unesco says that since February 2022, none of its designated heritage sites in Ukraine appear to have been damaged. But there are only seven such areas on its list, apart from the historic core of Lviv. Otherwise, the organization says more than 100 churches, a score of museums and several monuments have suffered in the fighting — mostly in the east, around the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, which have seen the most intense warfare. In March 2022, the late 17th century Cathedral of the Dormition in Kharkiv — where people had taken refuge — was hit by a Russian missile.

The Unesco list of damaged cultural sites is long and unlikely to be complete. The area around Lviv, which is on the western side of the country close to Poland, has been bombed at least once almost every month since the beginning of the war. 

Defending bastions of national identity is of immense importance — not just to preserve cultural legacy but to buttress patriotic resolve. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US, my friend Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time: “If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe.” Beyond unmoored confidence, the ensuing cycles of vengeance have their own spiritual and material costs.  

In both world wars, for example, extraordinary measures were taken in London to protect St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was hit by dozens of incendiary bombs at one point and saved by swift action by specially trained fire brigades used to the complex layout of the late 17th-century edifice.

The church’s survival through constant assault became emblematic of British defiance. Then came the retaliatory firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Those attacks by British and US air forces destroyed the historic 18th-century Frauenkirche — the Lutheran Church of Our Lady — as well as almost all of the capital of Saxony.

Churches were certainly not sacrosanct to the atheist Soviet Union. In 1931, the Politburo ordered the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow; it was built by Czar Alexander I to commemorate Napoleon’s retreat from the city and the salvation of Russia.

And in the early part of World War II, as Nazi Germany’s forces entered Kyiv, the Soviet military set off explosions that destroyed more than 300 buildings, including the 11th-century Cathedral of the Dormition (part of a monastery complex that is now a Unesco heritage site). 

Resurgent powers rebuild their cathedrals. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyiv — and an independent Ukraine — reconstructed the dynamited cathedral. A newly spiritual post-Soviet Russia rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Savior at the cost of more than $300 million.

A reunited Germany saw the Frauenkirche rise again — with the help of €180 million ($198 million). New York City now has a new skyscraper in place of the twin towers, at a cost of almost $4 billion. Restoration can be a sweet, if expensive, sequel to bitter history.

But there can be vengeance in ruins, too. For decades, the stones of the Frauenkirche were a testament to the cruelty of war. The Hiroshima dome isn’t just a visual caution against nuclear war but of the military insouciance that picked the city as a target.

Britain let the remains of many bombed out churches stand — a reminder of what Germany wrought. In London, the steeple and a couple of walls are all that are left of Christchurch Greyfriars, now a park near St. Paul’s. The walls of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital not far away are still pockmarked from wartime shrapnel. Down a small side street off Eastcheap is the spectral St. Dunstan in the East.

One day, the war will come to an end in Ukraine. The lives lost may well have monuments raised to their memory. But their ghosts will also haunt us in ways more difficult to exorcise. They won’t be invisible: They are being carved into walls by violence today, and though these marks will be silent, they will be blood from stone, calling out in anger for generations to come.