The Raphael Lemkin Society investigates how Russia is turning Ukrainian museums in temporarily occupied territories into a tool for rewriting memory

Raphael Lemkin gave the world the word "genocide". A Polish-Jewish lawyer who studied in Lviv, he lost 49 relatives, including his parents, during the Holocaust. Later, his work became one of the intellectual foundations of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. But for Ukrainian history, Lemkin's name has another significance: in 1953, in New York, he spoke about Soviet policy in Ukraine as the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation.

Author: Alexander Khmelnitsky

Today, his name is borne by a Ukrainian non-governmental organization — the Raphael Lemkin Society, which unites lawyers, researchers, cultural figures, and human rights activists. One of the issues it works on during the current war may seem museum-like at first glance: what is happening to Ukrainian collections and cultural institutions in territories occupied by Russia?

But very quickly, this question ceases to be only about museums.

Because a museum can be destroyed. Paintings, documents, and archaeological finds can be taken out of it. Or the museum can be left open — and the history it tells people can be changed.

This is exactly the picture Ukrainian researchers are trying…

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