[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/lviv-historic-city-centre-UNESCO-Silvan-Rehfeld.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tFor months Russia and Ukraine have been trading deadly drone strikes, and over the last couple of days Russia launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. A March 24 Russian strike in the historic center of the city of Lviv damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery that includes a church devoted to St. Andrew, designed by Italian architects in a Mannerist style.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFounded in the late Middle Ages, the historic center of the city was named a World Heritage Site in 1998; per UNESCO, it was \u201cpreserved virtually intact \u2026 along with many fine Baroque and later buildings.\u201d The organization added it to its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile not naming the perpetrator, UNESCO released a statement Wednesday saying it is \u201cdeeply alarmed\u201d by the strike, noting that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tRussia\u2019s participation in the upcoming edition of the Venice Biennale has come under major scrutiny, and the latest strike gave Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs Andrii Sybiha occasion to put pressure on the event\u2019s organizers, who are welcoming a Russian pavilion for the first time since the country\u2019s war in Ukraine began. The European Union has even said it could pull funding from the show if the pavilion goes ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cDon\u2019t look away, @la_Biennale,\u201d Sybiha wrote on X. \u201cThis is the ugly face of barbaric Russia\u2014destroyed UNESCO World Heritage in the protected center of Lviv. This is the barbarism you wish to normalize at the Biennale. Get real!\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tEarly on in the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, reports emerged of a sustained campaign of cultural destruction throughout Ukraine. As of May 9, 2022, UNESCO had verified damage to 127 landmarks in Ukraine, including 11 museums, 54 religious buildings, and 15 monuments. Ukrainian officials alleged that Russian troops had looted more than 2,000 artworks from three cultural institutions in the battered port city of Mariupol.<\/p>\n
\n\tUkrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the most recent attack in an address. \u201cIranian \u2018Shahed\u2019 drones, modernized by Russia, are striking a church in Lviv,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is an absolute perversion, and only someone like Putin could find this appealing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRussia\u2019s strike, with almost 1,000 drones deployed throughout the country, was \u201cone of Moscow\u2019s largest aerial attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invation\u201d in 2022, reports Euro News<\/em>. The strike started overnight and continued into a rare daytime attack with more than 550 drones hitting central and western parts of the country, the outlet reports, noting that at least three have been killed and dozens injured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/ukrainian-russia-venice-biennale-drone-unesco-monastery-1234779036\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/lviv-historic-city-centre-UNESCO-Silvan-Rehfeld.jpg?w=1024″] For months Russia and Ukraine have been trading deadly drone strikes, and over the last couple of days Russia launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. A March 24 Russian strike in the historic center of the city of Lviv damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery that includes a church devoted to St. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1849329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1849329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}