The Historian Who Understood Immediately That Putin’s Invasion Was A Threat To Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage

In early March 2022, when his country seemed in danger of falling to the Russians, it occurred to Leonid Marushchak, a historian by training, to call the director of a museum in eastern Ukraine to check that a collection of 20th-century studio pottery was safe.

He had loved the modernist works by artist Natalya Maksymchenko since he had encountered them almost a decade earlier. There were vessels covered with bold abstract glazes in purple, scarlet and yellow; exuberant figurines of musicians and dancers with swirling skirts; dishes painted with birds in flight. The collection was the radiant highlight of the local history museum in Sloviansk, the ceramicist’s home town.

It was remarkable that they were in this small museum at all. Though she was born in Ukraine in 1914 and studied in Kharkiv, Maksymchenko had lived the rest of her life in Russia. But, after her death in 1978, her family, fulfilling her wishes, oversaw the transfer of about 400 works from her studio in Moscow to the city of her birth. It was a deeply resonant act. When the historic traffic of artworks has so often been from Ukraine to Russia, when artists’ national allegiances have been subsumed by the Soviet Union, when works in international museums by Ukrainians (such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich) have been routinely labelled “Russian”, Maksymchenko’s final gift to her home town and country seemed like a statement of defiance.

Now, as the Russian army inched nearer and nearer to the museum, Marushchak worried that these works in delicate porcelain could be destroyed by a missile in a moment – or, if Sloviansk were occupied, taken by the invaders back to Moscow. Had the ceramics been prioritised for the first round of evacuations, Marushchak asked the museum director on the phone.

“Lyonya, what round?” came the reply. “We still haven’t got the order to evacuate!”

Marushchak phoned his friend Kateryna Chuyeva, who was then Ukraine’s deputy minister for culture. “Katya,” he asked her, “why have you still not given the order for the Sloviansk museum?” She explained that she couldn’t just authorise it herself – the regional authorities needed to request it first. So he called the region’s culture department. They said that to issue an order, they would first need a full list of items to be evacuated.

Marushchak was furious. The situation was urgent; there was no time for that kind of paperwork. “Let’s just say I have sometimes had to take my time and breathe slowly,” said Chuyeva, in the face of her friend’s sometimes volcanic passion. She found a way to break the bureaucratic impasse. Before the official order had even arrived, Maruschak was on his way to Sloviansk.

Marushchak cannot drive. When I asked him why he hasn’t learned, he joked that if he had a licence, he’d have long ago driven to Russia to try to bring back Ukrainian artworks that have, over the centuries, been taken from his country. Without his own means of getting to Sloviansk, Marushchak had his brother-in-law drive him from Kyiv 300 miles east to the city of Dnipro. From there, friends took him a further 50 miles, to the city of Pavlohrad. Then he walked to the last checkpoint in town and hitched a lift for the last 120 miles – this time, on a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier.

In Sloviansk, artillery boomed alarmingly close; the opposing armies were fighting over a town only 18 miles away. When Marushchak reached the museum, staff were finally packing up the exhibits – though, to his annoyance, the official instructions on what should be prioritised dated from 1970, and stated that what he referred to as “an old bucket of medals” from the second world war should be rescued first. Aside from the Maksymchenko ceramics and the medals, there was also a natural history collection to deal with – AKA, stuffed animals, which, just to add another layer of danger to the enterprise, had probably been preserved with highly toxic arsenic. Into Marushchak’s ark – in reality, a police van that deputy minister for culture Chuyeva had managed to commandeer for him – went a moose, a bison, a fox, a wild boar, a wolf and a small herd of deer. All were spirited on a long journey west to a safer location.

Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline – packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things” – putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline.

A nation’s understanding of itself is built on intangible things: stories and music, poems and language, habits and traditions. But it is also held in its artworks and artefacts, fragile objects that human hands have made and treasured. Once lost or destroyed, they are gone for ever, along with the stores of knowledge they contain, and potential knowledge that future generations might harvest from them. For Marushchak, his country’s culture, no less than its territory, is at stake in this war: a culture that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed has no distinct existence, except as an adjunct to Russia’s.

On that day in Sloviansk, something became clear to him: there was no point relying on official evacuation efforts. If he wanted to see the job done, he was going to have to do it himself. “He had to do it with his own hands,” his friend, the artist Zhanna Kadyrova told me. “There was no one else.”

Marushchak, 38, is a tall, fair, round-faced man with a clipped beard and a close-shaved head. When he smiles, he radiates an intense sunniness, but in the background one senses a volatile weather system that might abruptly cloud into fury. Moods – impatience, frustration, delight – flit across his face in quick succession. The first time we spoke, in the autumn of 2023, at a cafe in Kyiv, he seemed anxious almost to the point of hostility. He drummed a set of keys nervously against the tabletop, talking so rapidly, and scattering so many conversational tangents, that it was hard to keep up. Yet the more we spoke, during the following spring and summer, the warmer he became. He is a person who, once he has decided to commit to something, becomes unshakeably attached. (When I asked his wife, Marta Bilas, how she would describe him to a stranger, she said “stubborn”.) “He lives his project. He thinks on a different scale from most people,” his friend Arif Bagirov told me.

Bagirov, a reformed “hooligan” (his word), from the now-occupied east of Ukraine, is one of the tight group of helpers who have worked with Marushchak, trusting him with their lives in the most perilous of situations. Others include a team of drivers including Marharita Kravchenko, a self-possessed young woman with razor-sharp cheekbones; Zhanna Kadyrova, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated artists; and Diana Berg, a glamorous, twice-displaced activist and arts manager who fled Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2014 and then the besieged Mariupol in 2022. “We are like partisans, like guerrilla fighters,” said Marushchak.

One day this spring, in his flat in Kyiv, pouring glasses of rosé and radiating bonhomie, Marushchak pulled out some of his own treasures, artworks that he has collected over the years – an early 20th-century oil painting of the apricot groves and slag heaps of the Donbas; red-glazed 1960s studio pottery by Nina Fedorova; a cheery 20th-century folk appliqué textile; a cross-stitch embroidery depicting national poet Taras Shevchenko; a 19th-century icon. Marushchak is one of life’s enthusiasts, deeply knowledgable and passionate about Ukraine’s artistic history – and, after a decade working with museums in eastern Ukraine, he happens to know the museums that have ended up on Ukraine’s frontline like no one else.

Until recently, he has done his evacuation work in secret. This is the first time he has spoken of the work to a journalist. Even Bilas, his wife, hasn’t always known the full story. During the chaos of the first few months of war, the couple were flung from their home in Kyiv to different parts of Ukraine. Unbeknown to Bilas, while she was living with her parents in the far west of the country, Marushchak started making daily 300-mile round trips to the capital. Each morning, with his brother-in-law at the wheel of Bilas’s black Mini Countryman, he would take humanitarian aid into Kyiv – and each afternoon he would take art out. “At that time no one knew whether Kyiv would fall under occupation. And if it did, at some point the Russians would target museum collections and archives,” Marushchak told me.

One of his first big evacuation missions from the capital was the family-owned archive of Viktor Zaretsky and Alla Horska, one of Ukraine’s most important artist couples of the 20th century. It felt especially important to Marushchak to safeguard this work: in the 1960s Horska had defied the Soviet regime to reassert suppressed national symbols – Ukrainian folkloric heroes, for example – in her sinuous, modernist drawings. She was, according to Marushchak, “basically the founder of Ukrainian identity in the 1960s”. (She was murdered in 1970, likely by the KGB for her dissident activities.)

When Bilas finally saw her car again after three months, on her return to Kyiv in May 2022, she noticed a pair of punctures in the s oft lining on the inside of one of the doors. “I asked Leonid and the guys, ‘Who’s been sleeping here in high heels?’ and they said, ‘Oh, so that’s from some horns.’” Unbeknown to her, they been using her car to evacuate a collection of taxidermy.

Part of the reason for secrecy was that Marushchak didn’t want to worry his wife. “For example, I didn’t know he went to Bakhmut about 27 times,” Bilas said. “I’d call and he’d say, ‘I’m busy, the phone is funny, the connection is bad.’” If she asked too many questions, he and his team would just “curl up like hedgehogs”, she said. That was despite the fact that she was raising money to support the evacuations, relying on donors who understood the need to release funds quickly with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss. In any case, she was herself too busy to pay too much attention to the details: aside from her day job in PR, at the start of the invasion she was asked by an old boss, who was by then working for the government, to assemble a team of linguists to translate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s daily speeches into 14 languages, including English, French, Arabic and Chinese.

There were other reasons for secrecy, too. At one point Bilas came across a notebook in their flat “filled with symbols and weird code”. These were Marushchak’s records of storage locations. “If someone sees this notebook, I don’t want them to understand which collection went where and how is it packed and how’s it marked,” Marushchak said. (For this reason, Marushchak did not allow the stores to be photographed or inspected for this article.)

For some of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, it is already too late: like the contents of Mariupol’s Museum of Local History, which succumbed to multiple fires during the aerial bombing of the city; like the 3,000 cultural sites that have been officially reported damaged or destroyed; like the uncountable ancient sites in Ukraine’s archaeology-rich east and south that have been wrecked. In many places, what has not been destroyed is vulnerable to theft and looting. In November 2022, just before they withdrew from the city, Russian occupiers loaded five truckloads of works from the Kherson Art Museum and drove them to Russian-occupied Crimea.

Artworks have long formed part of the spoils of war, but art is always more than simply a question of beautiful, desirable objects. Culture and politics are interleaved, as Ukraine’s history – so full of violence against culture and cultural figures – shows. The killing, in Stalin’s purges of the early 1930s, of an entire generation of modernist Ukrainian writers known as “the executed renaissance”, looms especially large for today’s cultural figures. In today’s war, occupying forces have seen the very act of writing in Ukrainian or owning Ukrainian books as a threat.

By the time Bilas was examining the strange puncture marks in her Mini’s upholstery, Marushchak was devoting his every waking hour to evacuating artworks and artefacts – taking the work upon himself when official procedures were neglected, unworkable or nonexistent. “He went to places where there was a very high chance of being killed or captured,” said Diana Berg, the activist, who helped the efforts by initially having the donations that Bilas raised flow through her cultural NGO. “He was ready to put his life on the line – for the history of our culture.”

Marushchak has conducted many of his missions with his friend, professional driver Yevhen Sternichuk, at the wheel. They have known each other for years, since Sternichuk was a kid at a summer camp in Crimea in the early 2000s, and Marushchak a camp counsellor. There still seems something of that protective relationship about the pair. After the invasion in 2022, Sternichuk said, Marushchak called him straight away, checking if he needed help, or money. As soon as Sternichuk heard about Marushchak’s art rescue projects, he wanted to help.

By the summer of 2022, thanks to donations, Sternichuk graduated from driving Bilas’s Mini Countryman to a roomy van, a white Mercedes Sprinter. “I drove 60,000km in that van,” said Sternichuk fondly. On one trip, what at first felt like an enormous pothole turned out to be the shock waves from a supersonic bomber, which all but knocked the van over. Another time, a Ukrainian tank almost crushed them by accident. “We had some shenanigans together,” he said.

In April 2022, Marushchak and Sternichuk were regularly in Lysychansk, a city in the Luhansk region with a prewar population of about 95,000. Under relentless shelling, it was being reduced to rubble. Marushchak was keeping a watchful eye on the Lysychansk Local History Museum. Aside from the strong chance that it could be obliterated by a missile, he could see that people had been getting inside, perhaps looting it. In one of the rooms was an art installation by his friend, Mykhailo Alekseenko. It included a fur coat that had belonged to the artist’s grandmother, and a dining table set with elaborate glassware, “as if people had just left the table”, Alekseenko told me when we met in Kyiv. The artwork began haunting Marushchak whenever he saw it through the museum windows. Why hadn’t it been evacuated yet? “I started to terrorise the Lysychansk museum authorities,” he said. When Chuyeva, the deputy minister for culture, rang, “I told her, If they don’t let me have it, I’ll steal it.”

The first Alekseenko knew about the rescue mission, he told me, was when he got a text message a couple of months later from Marushchak, as he was checking through the objects in the safe storage area: “Hey, how are you? We’re just refreshing the air around your family treasures – please tell me how many shot glasses there were?” Alexeenko still can’t quite believe what Marushchak did. “Imagine the surrealism. There are battles, shellings, noise, explosions, checkpoints every other step, and Lyonya drives in, saying ‘I need the fur. And I need the crystal.’”

Next, Marushchak set his sights on another museum, on the edge of Lysychansk, in a district that had been particularly heavily shelled. “No one wanted to go there with me, not even the military,” he remembered. But two people did volunteer: his local friend Arif Bagirov, and a friend of Bagirov’s, who goes by the call sign “Zombie”. (Such call signs are a borrowing from military parlance – soldiers are addressed by such nicknames as a security measure.) Bagirov, who has the creased face of a heavy smoker and the wiry physique of a long-distance cyclist, explained that in the 1990s, he and Zombie “were young, jobless men in this industrial city in which all the plants and factories had shut down. I used to do a bit of boxing,” he said, elliptically. “It was easy money and hard drugs.” He’d gone straight 20 years ago, he told me, but Zombie (“a good-looking lad, but dangerous,” he said) still attracted police attention.

For the mission, Bagirov acquired a red pickup truck, which he named Skrypa, or “Squeaker”. Together, the trio made their way to the palace of culture – whose facade has, or rather had, a Soviet mosaic depicting cheery cosmonauts, including Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, now, from her seat in the Russian state duma, a hearty supporter of the invasion of Ukraine.

Upstairs was a small museum devoted to Volodymyr Sosiura, a poet who had worked in a factory in the city as a young man before the first world war. He wrote a poem that all Ukrainians know. “Love your Ukraine, love as you would the sun / The wind, the grasses and the streams together … / Love her in happy hours, when joys are won / And love her in her time of stormy weather,” runs the first verse.

Bagirov knew the place. “Lots of busts of the poet. Larger busts, smaller busts. Personal belongings,” he told me. “A regular Soviet memorial museum.” Despite its modesty, Marushchak remembered how artists he had brought there loved it. “The director would run to meet us – literally – and would be glad to see each new friend of ours that we brought along,” he recalled.

As they drew up outside for this one last visit, so did a multiple rocket launcher system. It wasn’t that the Ukrainian MRLS was a danger to them: the problem was that if it fired at the Russians, the Russians would fire back.

It fired. “How long have we got?” asked Marushchak.

“Three to five minutes, maybe. Max 10,” said Bagirov.

Marushchak and Zombie dashed upstairs, where a museum employee was there to meet them. Waiting outside with the engine running, Bagirov took the opportunity to tuck into the burger that he had asked Marushchak to bring, as there was no fast food any more in Lysychansk. Inside the museum, Marushchak and the others rushed to assemble archive crates, take photos, open glass cases, pack objects. The prize artefact was Sosiura’s natty emerald-green trilby hat. They got the job done in 10 minutes and were out of there as the Russians started to return fire. Bagirov had just enough time to finish the burger.

From the summit of Mount Kremenets in eastern Ukraine, you can look down on the town of Izium, now a wreck of twisted metal and smashed buildings, and the endless forest and steppe beyond. Until recently, nine ancient sculptures stared out over this same view. They are larger and sturdier than living humans, with mighty hips and breasts. Age has blurred their facial features into inscrutability. Beside them, you feel a little smaller, a little more what you really are, which is to say a flimsy, short-lived creature of bone and muscle and soft tissue. Carved about 1,000 years ago by Turkic nomads of the steppe, the solemn figures have something of the presence of Easter Island moai.

Old they may be, but the babas, as sculptures of this type are known, are not indestructible. The area around Mount Kremenets was occupied at the start of the war, and retaken after a rapid Ukrainian counteroffensive in the autumn of 2022. A few days afterwards, as soon as he heard the army was planning to inspect and de-mine Mount Kremenets, Marushchak got on the road to check out the damage, not just to the babas, but to museums and other monuments in the area. Finding that one of the sculptures had indeed been damaged by artillery, he moved its broken parts to the Izium museum, and put a cover over its base to protect it. Later, he would organise the evacuation of the whole group, along with many others elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine.

While in Izium, Marushchak learned that a group of soldiers had found a stash of icons – paintings of Christ or other religious subjects, and objects of veneration in eastern Orthodoxy. They had apparently been looted from different churches by the invaders, then gathered together and stored, likely with the intention of transporting them to Russia. Impulsively, Marushchak asked the soldiers to lead him to the place. He and his driver, this time a friend called Ivan Yatsenko, followed the soldiers to a village via a tortuous route that, without a GPS signal, the pair tried to memorise. The soldiers led them to a building beside a kindergarten: inside were stacks of artworks.

“Where are we?” asked Marushchak. The soldiers had no idea of the name of the village: what they did say was that they had found the icons after breaking through enemy lines, just that morning. Meaning: they were now in what was still, officially, Russian-held territory. No one was in a mood to linger. They stacked the paintings – some from as early as the 17th century, assessed Marushchak – into the van around a bronze, bespectacled memorial to Sergey Prokofiev that Marushchak and Yatsenko had rescued from the village where the composer was born in the Donetsk region, the previous day.

By now it was 11pm. Marushchak assumed the soldiers would escort them back to Izium, or at least a recognisable road – but they shrugged. They had to be on their way, they said. They were due back at their positions. Marushchak and Yatsenko were now on their own, on the wrong side of the frontline, with a van full of icons and a broken memorial to Prokofiev. They were illegally out after curfew, they had no documents to show that they weren’t looters, and they had no idea how they were going to get through the numerous checkpoints between them and the city of Kharkiv, more than 100km away. Worse, they had only a shaky notion of how to find their way back. Each placed their hope in the other’s ability to navigate their way back through the tangle of unmade roads.

To their relief, the many checkpoints they passed were unmanned – until, that is, they reached the outskirts of Kharkiv in the small hours. Marushchak, hands shaking, asked the soldiers manning the post to call the police (“the first time I’ve ever called the police on myself”). In the end, he said, the story of the vanload of treasures was so disorienting that the officer who turned up just let the matter go. The one thing that attracted his attention was an improperly secured gas cylinder. He said he’d have to write them up for that.

Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”

When I asked Marushchak’s friend Arif Bagirov whether he had felt it worth the risk to his life to evacuate the Volodymyr Sosiura museum, he said, “I told myself, ‘Listen Arif, these are your last days. You might as well live them brightly. Make your death beautiful.’” And if he’d died for Sosiura’s hat? “That would have been the most beautiful death of all.”

Long after most of the inhabitants had departed, Bagirov chose to stay in his home town of Sievierodonetsk, which is just across the river from Lysychansk, even closer to what was then the frontline. Mostly, he was delivering aid to vulnerable people who had been unable to leave, riding the deserted shell-cratered streets on his beloved red bicycle (call sign: Mammoth). He and a group of students managed to evacuate a group of recently excavated ancient clay pots, decorated with incised geometric patterns, from the university. They date from between 2600 and 2000BC. Thanks to Bagirov, they survive yet.

When the Ukrainian military told him that it was time for him to leave, Bagirov gave them Squeaker, the pickup. Then he got on Mammoth and pedalled across the bridge and up the hill to Lysychansk. From there, “I looked back down and saw there was smoke coming out of Sievierodonetsk,” he said. “I thought, ‘Great, I’ve made it out.’ Then I looked in front of me and saw smoke there, too.” With no mobile signal, he hadn’t realised that the battle had already spread to the road to Bakhmut – his route to supposed safety. Somehow, he made the 40-mile ride unscathed. A few weeks, later, Sievierodonetsk fell to the Russians, soon followed by Lysychansk. Bagirov lives in Kyiv now, in the flat of a friend who is fighting on the frontline. He misses his old life.

But no one in Ukraine has their “old life”. Everyone lives closer to death than they once did; some people, terrifyingly close. “You acknowledge to yourself you might die. But it’s too early for me – I have cats at home that need looking after,” said Marharita Kravchenko, a professional driver who goes by the call sign Raketa (Rocket), who has worked with Marushchak on some of his most perilous missions. When I asked her why she had felt able to take such risks, she said, “It’s my land and my history. They come, they kill, they loot, but our future generations need to know who and what we are: that’s my motivation.”

She may have felt it was too early for her to die, but the relentless battle for Bakhmut told a different story. By December 2022, when she was regularly driving Marushchak in the region, the population had sunk from 72,000 to 12,000, most of whom were living in basements as the city above was, by degrees, razed to the ground. Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was throwing soldiers, many of them convicts, into what became known as the “Bakhmut meat grinder”.

From this hellscape, Marushchak was determined to retrieve an important artefact: a unique carved lion, a sculpture of the same era as the medieval babas, from the Bakhmut Local History Museum. The plan was that Kravchenko would drive Marushchak to the outskirts of the city to rendezvous with the military, while she went on to a town about 18 miles west to wait for him.

Nothing went to plan. Kravchenko ended up driving Marushchak right into Bakhmut. Her father, a mortar operator in the Ukrainian army, happened to be stationed there; in Marushchak’s bleakly humorous account of the trip, he was more afraid of getting beaten up by Kravchenko’s dad for exposing his daughter to such danger than of death from the intense Russian shelling. At a bomb shelter they met a museum employee who gave Marushchak a map showing where the building’s main door key was hidden. As they arrived at the museum, people scattered – looters were trying to get in. Consulting the hand-drawn map, Marushchak scrabbled through the icy ground beneath a fir tree until he unearthed a pretty porcelain sugar bowl, which now sits on a shelf in his Kyiv apartment. The key inside it, though, was too rusted to work, and the lock seemed like it had been tampered with, anyway. They did find another door unlocked, leading to an empty basement room in which they found only a handgun – almost certainly left there by looters. As they filed a report on the weapon at the police station, a deafening boom sent them running to the basement, and the van’s roof was battered with shrapnel.

The lion’s rescue would eventually take place early the following year. Marushchak had sent Kravenchko away for a break. He went in alone, with the military. “There was already a Russian group in the city, fighting street by street with Ukrainian soldiers,” he recalled. The chances of getting to the museum again under such circumstances seemed minimal. They had, his military escort estimated, 15 minutes before the next wave of Russians reached them.

They got the precious lion, but barely escaped with their lives. On the journey out of Bakhmut, a shell exploded right next to the vehicle. Somehow, none of them was harmed. When I asked Marushchak about the risks that he had taken for this, and so many other artefacts, he gesticulated airily towards central Kyiv around us. “It’s a war, you can die anywhere,” he said. “We could die right now, at this cafe.” Which was true, strictly speaking. But Kyiv in late spring, with its largely reliable air defence, its bars and its parks and restaurants, was a world way from the ruins of Bakhmut.

Marta Bilas, Marushchak’s wife – his calm, measured foil – told me that there was a point a few months ago when she realised she hadn’t seen the Mercedes Sprinter for a while. “I was like, ‘Where’s the van?’ And he said, ‘It’s in Nikopol.’ And at some point, I said, ‘Look, there is nothing there right now and most of the city is evacuated.’”

It was then that Marushchak finally told Bilas the truth about the Sprinter – and about everything else that she hadn’t known about the danger and the frequency of his missions. Or nearly everything. She still isn’t sure whether she knows every twist in the tale. A friend of hers once compared the situation to being friends with a couple when you know one is of them is sleeping with someone else. The dilemma, said the friend, is whether to say anything to the one being cheated on. Bilas rolled her eyes as she told me this. The analogy of her husband cheating on her with the cultural heritage of Ukraine was not necessarily one that she wished to dwell on.

What happened to the Sprinter was this. Marushchak, along with a driver called Dima Kapshuk, were in Beryslav, a town in Kherson region, close to Russian positions just across the Dnipro river. Kapshuk was packing a box into the van when he heard something – by the weird, gnawing sound of it, an Iranian-made kamikaze drone. He ran back inside the museum as it hit the van. Another drone hit something else, somewhere; a third, they could hear, was intercepted. Now came an even more terrifying sound: a Russian plane overhead. “It could have been about to drop a glide bomb,” said Marushchak. “And that would have taken out the whole museum, with us in it.”

Kapshuk ran outside. The back of the van was cratered, its body pitted with shrapnel holes, its windscreen broken, the shattered glass hanging concave in its frame. Somehow, though, the engine started. They got in, and Kapshuk drove the wounded vehicle to the relative safety of Mikolaiv, 85 miles away. In spring 2024, I went to see it in a yard on the outskirts of Kyiv, where Marushchak and Marharita Kravchenko reverently removed its tarpaulin covering and showed me its battered bulk. Lover of museums that he is, Marushchak would like to donate the Sprinter to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.

The work goes on. It is harder, now, said Bilas: it takes her five days to raise the money she once raised in five hours. It is tougher psychologically, too. “I used to always be joking, ‘Oh, you guys moved so many collections. You will have so much work after the war to move it all back.’” That was when the war seemed like it might not last long. Now, she told me, that joke has worn thin. In places like Bakhmut, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, there is nowhere left for the collections to return to. They are under occupation, with no immediate prospect of returning to Ukrainian hands. The cities that sustained the museums are rubble, their communities scattered or killed.

Marushchak’s friends are anxious about the toll his work is taking on him. “He saw so much pain and destruction, so many attempts to destroy everything Ukrainian,” said his friend Diana Berg. “He doesn’t know how to rest. He works 24/7,” said the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. “Even the most resilient person has his limits.”

And yet the importance of the often humble-seeming regional museums that Marushchak had helped safeguard is incalculable, Chuyeva told me, especially in the light of the losses that Ukraine has suffered to its culture over the centuries. “The problem is that we have so many gaps, we have so many lost objects and documents and traditions, that we just cannot go in this way any more,” she said. “We have to stop it, we have to protect what we do have.”

When Marushchak and I spoke for the last time for this article, it was on Zoom. He was mid-mission. Sternichuk was at the wheel of a van, and they had pulled off the highway into an Okko, the chain of service stations that has sustained many on Ukraine’s long roads during this war. Marushchak told me about going to the Kupiansk Local History Museum in Kharkiv region the day after it was destroyed by a missile attack that killed its director and another employee. He and others dug through the rubble and the wet clay of the soil, looking for the museum’s inventory books. “I will remember the smell of the wet clay for the rest of my life,” he said.

The pair were continuing to cover prodigious distances. The previous day they had driven from Kyiv to Kherson, via Nikopol. Today, they were between Kherson and Kharkiv. There was work to be done as the Russians tried to push their lines forward towards Ukraine’s second city. The whole trip added up to 708 miles. The following week, Marushchak sent me some photos and video from the Kherson region. A baba recumbent in the steppe, huge-hipped, hands clasped in front of its body, metres away from a shell-hole, was being gently lifted from the grassland, and taken to a place of safety.