(Reuters) – Russian shelling hit a museum dedicated to the philosopher and poet Hryhoriy Skovoroda in the Ukrainian village of Skovorodynivka, causing a fire that destroyed the building, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Sinegubov said on Saturday.
The overnight shelling hit the roof of the Hryhoriy Skovoroda Literary Memorial Museum, injuring a 35-year-old custodian, but the most valuable items had been moved earlier to a safer place, Sinegubov said in a post on social media.
“The premises were practically all destroyed,” he said.
Skovoroda, a famous 18th century philosopher and poet of Ukraine Cossack origin, spent the last years of his life on an estate of the local landowners in the village of Ivanovka, which was later renamed in his honour – Skovorodynivka.
“This year marks the 300th anniversary of the great philosopher’s birth,” Sinegubov said. “The occupiers can destroy the museum where Hryhoriy Skovoroda worked for the last years of his life and where he was buried. But they will not destroy our memory and our values.”
Moscow calls its actions a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of what it calls anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked act of aggression.
(Reporting in Melbourne by Lidia Kelly and in Kyiv by Pavel Polityuk; Writing in Melbourne by Lidia Kelly; Editing by William Maclean)
