"We traveled 1,000 kilometers in five days. It was a terrible trip, we were driving with planes flying overhead without even knowing if they were Ukrainian," recalls this 50-year-old woman, commissioner of Khortytsia museum exhibition.

"The most difficult thing was to convince people at the roadblocks not to search the collections and to let the truck pass as quickly as possible," she continues.

The museum island of Khortytsia, on the Dnipro River, was occupied from the 16th century by Ukrainian Cossacks, who made it their base until its destruction by the Russian Empress Catherine II in 1775.

This is where the first Zaporozhian "Sitch" was born, a political regime practicing direct democracy.

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It is "a sacred place for the history of Ukraine", confides to AFP Maksym Ostapenko, 51, who directs the museum created on the spot, a high Ukrainian cultural place sheltering in particular dozens of historical objects. found during archaeological excavations.

- "Evacuation plan" -

Originally from the region, Mr. Ostapenko joined the Ukrainian army at the start of the Russian invasion, like most of his colleagues.

But they have not abandoned their museum for all that.

"To tell the truth, we had sketched out an evacuation plan in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea" by Russia, continues Mr. Ostapenko: "We had drawn up a + priority list + of a hundred works, the most precious, which had to be evacuated in case of danger".

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"The cultural heritage cannot be reconstituted. We are obliged to take precautions", insists the director.

From February 23, two days after a speech by Vladimir Putin leaving little doubt as to the reality of the invasion, the museum teams began to dismantle the collections.

When the Moscow offensive was launched the next day, it was under Russian shelling that they began the evacuation.

Stopped about forty kilometers south of Zaporijjia, the Russian army did not finally take possession of Khortytsia even though three missiles fell on the island, without touching the museum buildings.

The "Sitch Kamianska", one of its subsidiaries located further south, in the Kherson region, where the first Ukrainian Constitution was conceived, was however quickly occupied by Russian troops.

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"Staff no longer have access to the site. Moreover, we have not had contact with our colleagues for a while," laments Mr. Ostapenko.

- Looting –

According to UNESCO, 175 cultural sites have been damaged in Ukraine since the start of the invasion on February 24.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture considers that around 100 museums, and nearly 17,000 objects of cultural heritage, are in the occupied territories.

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60 kilometers from Khortytsia, Vasylivka, close to the front line, was occupied by the Russian army in the first days of the invasion.

The city is home to Popov's mansion, a strange neo-Gothic building dating from the 19th century and damaged by gunfire in early March.

Part of the museum team decided to stay.

Its director Anna Golovko, 39, lives in Zaporizhia but tries to keep in touch with her colleagues.

"They do everything to preserve the buildings but it remains extremely complicated. As soon as they cover a window, a new bombardment blows it up," she confides.

The museum team did not have time to evacuate the collections of the manor outside the occupied territories which, the day after the fall of the city, received a visit from Russian soldiers seeking, according to Ms. Golovko, to loot the buildings.

In early August, two of her colleagues were imprisoned for four days and interrogated to reveal the location of the collections, she adds.

As for Natalia Tcherguik, she returned to live in Zaporijjia after her trip to the west but confides that the fate of Ukrainian heritage, especially in the occupied regions, is a "painful, omnipresent" question for her.

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"If we don't manage to save our cultural heritage, Ukraine's victory will be worth nothing."

© 2022 AFP