MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd June, 2023) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) says it has documented more than 260 cultural monuments in Ukraine damaged since February 2022, none of which is related to the World Heritage Sites.
"As of today UNESCO has verified and documented damages to 261 cultural sites that has been affected or destroyed," UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture Ernesto Ottone said at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London.
UNESCO has published the list of damaged monuments on its website, whereas Ukraine is depicted within its 2014 borders. The list includes monuments located in the Kiev-controlled territory of the Donetsk People's Republic, Mariupol and the Luhansk People's Republic, but it omits the monuments destroyed or dismantled by Ukrainian authorities for political reasons.
In January, interim Russian envoy to UNESCO Tatiana Dovgalenko said the organization appears to know � and ignore � the cases where monuments to Russian writers and poets are being demolished in Ukraine, as it considers it a domestic affair.
Russia is now repairing a famous theater building in Mariupol, which it says was bombed in March 2022 by Ukraine, which Kiev denies.
Archpriest Andrei Pavlenko, rector of the St. Tikhvin Cathedral of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Lysychansk, said that Ukrainian security forces put pressure on priests to present the destruction of towns from Ukrainian shelling as a result of the actions of Russian army. He said that the same thing happened in Sviatohirsk Lavra, where in the summer of 2022 about 400 civilians from nearby settlements as well as 200 monks were sheltering from shelling by the Ukrainian army.
