Ukraine Charges a Russian General in Absentia Over the Missile Strike That Destroyed the Skovoroda Museum

Ukraine’s prosecutor general reported that a Russian lieutenant general has been charged in absentia for ordering a missile strike that caused significant damage to the Hryhoriy Skovoroda National Literary Memorial Museum in the country’s Kharkiv region in the spring of 2022.

As reported by The Kyiv Independent, “According to the Prosecutor General, the Russian lieutenant general who ordered the attack is originally from the village of Chuhuiv in Kharkiv Oblast and commands Russia’s 6th Guards Air and Air Defense Forces Army.”

The prosecutor general wrote, “The (lieutenant) general knew for certain that he was attacking not a military target but a monument of Ukrainian culture. Despite this, he gave the combat order to destroy it.”

The memorial museum dedicated to Skovoroda, an 18th-century philosopher steeped in the Socratic method, was housed in an estate where he lived the final years of his life and died in 1794. The institution was one of many damaged or destroyed during the siege of Ukraine. As ARTnews reported in a roundup of embattled cultural sites in the country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after the attack in 2022, “Last night, the Russian army deployed one of its missiles to destroy the Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum in Kharkiv Region. A missile—to destroy a museum.”

As The Kyiv Independent reported, “Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s cultural heritage since the start of the full-scale war. As of September 2026, 2,161 cultural heritage sites and 2,665 cultural institutions in Ukraine had been damaged or destroyed, according to data collected by the Culture Ministry.”