The fourth year of the Russian war against Ukraine caused massive destruction of the built environment in the Ukrainian cities, including severe damage to architectural heritage as cultural monuments of the nation. The lecture provides a critical assessment of the state of Ukrainian architectural heritage during the war. As of January 2026, UNESCO has verified damage to 517 cultural sites in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, including 153 religious sites, 269 buildings of historical and artistic value, 38 museums, 33 monuments, 19 libraries, and 4 archaeological sites. The hardest-hit regions are Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, with damage violating international protection conventions. The architectural monuments embody centuries of historical and cultural significance, embrace the Ukrainian national identity and reflect the characters of historical epochs. The universal value of architectural heritage is underestimated by the international community. Consolidation of efforts is needed towards the restoration and architectural preservation of destroyed monuments in Ukraine. The lecture aims to disseminate the up-to-date information from the ground on architectural heritage in Ukraine being under the fourth year of wartime destruction.
If you cannot attend in person, you may watch the talk on Zoom. Register here.
Dr. Oksana Chabanyuk is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of History. Her position was supported by Scholars at Risk (SAR) Initiative at the University of Chicago. Chabanyuk is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Kharkiv National University of Urban Economy, Ukraine.
She is an architect, urban planner, and architectural historian. Her working trajectory has been characterized by a hybrid of overlapping activities in teaching, international academic visiting positions, intensive research, and design. Oksana Chabanyuk taught courses in the history of architecture and cultural studies for B.Sc., M.Arch., and Ph.D. programs at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan (2022-2025). Her research was supported by a Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia Scholars at Risk Fellowship (2022-2025) and the Fulbright Program as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar (2019-2020) at the University of Michigan, CREES and the WCEE, and by the Scholar Research Grant from Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University (2023). Oksana has been teaching Architectural Design Studio and pursuing research at the Technological University Dublin in Ireland (2015), the University of Lisbon in Portugal (2014-2015) and Lublin University of Technology in Poland (2016-2018). She participated in the Visiting Teachers Program at the AA School of Architecture, London (2010). She was appointed as a Visiting Lecturer at Nuremberg Institute of Technology, Germany (2022). Her expertise in neighborhood regeneration and housing design enabled her to serve as an External Expert at the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Her research has been published by MIT Press and Columbia University Press.
She received a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture, a Master’s degree in Urban Planning, and a Ph.D. in Architecture from Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine.
Presented by CEERES.