The Washington Post - USA (2022-03-27)

A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022

The World

IRAN

N uclear deal near,

E.U. diplomat says

The European Union’s top
diplomat, Josep Borrell, said
Saturday that Iran and world
powers were “very close” to an
agreement on reviving the 2015
deal that would curb Tehran’s
nuclear program in exchange for
lifting tough sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign
minister appeared to show
flexibility on an issue that has
been a leading sticking point in
the nuclear talks. Iranian
Foreign Minister Hossein
Amirabdollahian on Saturday
said the lifting of U.S. sanctions
on the Revolutionary Guard was

among Iran’s top demands in

talks, but added that senior

Guard officials had said that the

deal should not be held up over

the issue.

The United States abandoned

the pact in 2018, prompting

Tehran to start violating its

nuclear limits about a year later.

Eleven months of on-and-off

talks to revive it were paused in

Vienna earlier this month.

“Now we are very close to an

agreement and I hope it will be

possible,” Borrell said in an

address to the Doha Forum

international conference. He

later told reporters that he

believed a deal could be reached

“in a matter of days.”

— Reuters

JAPAN

Ambassador Emanuel

visits Hiroshima

Japanese Prime Minister

Fumio Kishida and U.S.

Ambassador to Japan Rahm

Emanuel paid tribute Saturday

to victims of the atomic

bombing here and warned of the

human devastation caused by

nuclear weapons.

In a somber moment in the

rain, the men each laid a wreath

at the Hiroshima victims

memorial. They visited the

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Museum, near ground zero, and

its exhibitions documenting the

human toll of the atomic

bombing. In 1945, the United

States dropped atomic bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

vaporizing the cities and

instantaneously killing tens of

thousands of people, mostly

civilians, in each.

Emanuel was chief of staff to

President Barack Obama, who in

2016 became the first sitting U.S.

president to visit Hiroshima.

Kishida, then foreign minister

and an elected representative

from the city, was instrumental

in arranging the 2016 visit.

Saturday was the Hiroshima

native’s first trip back to his

hometown since his campaign

last autumn to become the

country’s prime minister, and he

renewed his call for a world free

of nuclear weapons.

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee

Volcano triggers evacuations in

Philippines: A small volcano in

a scenic lake near the Philippine

capital blew a white plume of

steam and a mile into the sky in

a brief but powerful explosion,

prompting authorities to raise

the alert level and evacuate

hundreds of residents from

high-risk villages. Magma came

into contact with water in the

main crater of Taal volcano in

Batangas province, setting off

the steam-driven blast.

Iraq parliament fails to select

president, again: Iraq’s

parliament on Saturday failed

again to vote for a president

after Iran-backed groups

boycotted the session. It was a

setback to an alliance led by

cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which

won the parliamentary election.

Sadr had hoped parliament

would elect Rebar Ahmed, a

veteran Kurdish intelligence

official and current interior

minister of Iraq’s autonomous

Kurdistan region.

Tunisian police take down

militant groups: Tunisian police

forces have dismantled about

150 militant cells in the past six

months, Houssem Eddine

Jbebli, a spokesman for the

National Guard, said. He added

that some of the foreign

militants arrested were

planning to join Jond Kilafha, a

group linked to the Islamic State

in Libya.

— From news services

DIGEST

BY MAX BEARAK

AND ISABELLE KHURSHUDYAN

LVIV, Ukraine — Emptying a mu-
seum is a gargantuan task, and the
entire workforce of the Andrey
Sheptytsky National Museum in
Lviv had been at it for a week
before the final piece — a century-
old portrait of the museum’s
founder — was taken down, leav-
ing the last of its walls bare.
Ihor Kozhan, the director of the
grand gallery opposite Lviv’s op-
era house, explained the rush.
“There is an egomaniac in Mos-
cow who doesn’t care about kill-
ing children, let alone destroying
art,” he said. “If our history and
heritage are to survive, all art
must go underground.”
Across Ukraine, artists, galler-
ists, curators and museum direc-
tors are desperately but carefully
unhooking, wrapping and stash-
ing away the country’s hefty cul-
tural endowment as Vladimir Pu-
tin’s onslaught closes in. Statues,
stained-glass windows and monu-
ments are being covered with
shrapnel-proof material. Base-
ment bunkers are crammed with
paintings.
As Russian bombardments
have so far been heavier in the
eastern half of the country, two of
Ukraine’s richest cities in terms of
cultural heritage, Lviv and Odes-
sa, have had the benefit of extra
time. Volunteers in the latter, for
instance, took days to stack hun-
dreds of sandbags around a mon-
ument to the Duke of Richelieu, a
Frenchman who was one of the
cosmopolitan port city’s founders.
Just his head and his outstretched
right arm remain uncovered.
Kyiv and Kharkiv, the country’s
two biggest cities, were struck ear-
ly in the war and have already
suffered devastating losses.
The windows of Kharkiv’s main
art museum have been blown out,
subjecting the 25,000 artworks
inside to freezing temperatures
and snow for weeks. The city’s
opera and ballet theaters were
extensively shelled.
Twenty-five works by one of
Ukraine’s most celebrated paint-
ers, Maria Prymachenko, famed
for her colorful representation of
Ukrainian folklore and rural life,
were burned when Russians
bombed the museum housing
them in a town outside Kyiv. Oth-
er museums in the capital are
boarded up, their works still in-
side because those who would
have evacuated them have fled.
“City centers are seriously dam-
aged, some of which have sites
and monuments that date back to
the 11th century,” Lazare Eloun-
dou, the director of the United
Nations’ world heritage program,
told reporters earlier this month.
“It is a whole cultural life that
risks disappearing.”
The deliberate destruction of a
country’s or culture’s heritage is a
considered a war crime, but
UNESCO has not yet canceled its
next summit, which is scheduled
to take place in Russia.
As Russian troops attempt to
encircle Odessa, the Fine Arts Mu-
seum there has encircled itself
with razor wire.
“Trust me, it looks really wild to
me, too,” said Kirill Lipatov, the

museum’s director of science.

As in Lviv’s museums, the walls

inside are now bare, Lipatov said,

but he declined to reveal whether

its most valuable works had been

evacuated outside of the city.

Some of the pieces were painted

inside the museum — an ornate

palace dating back to the 1820s —

and have never left it, including

iconic 19-century Russian works

by Ivan Aivazovsky and Ilya Re-

pin.

“The first thought that came to

mind for me is that a Ukrainian

museum is protecting Russian

masterpieces from Russian ag-

gression,” Lipatov said. “I can’t

wrap my head around it.”

Even as they struggled to be-

lieve it, museum directors also

said their plight was hardly unfa-

miliar. Ukraine has been stripped

of artwork by invaders multiple

times over the past century.

After Russia’s invasion and an-

nexation of Crimea in 2014, doz-

ens of works that were located on

the peninsula were transferred to

Russian museums. During World

War II, thousands of works were

taken by Nazi soldiers to Ger-

many. A portrait of Yakov Galkin,

the director who evacuated Odes-

sa’s Fine Arts Museum during

World War II, hangs in Lipatov’s

office.

Saving art was secondary only

to saving lives, many of those in-

terviewed said, because Ukraini-

ans’ pride in their culture serves

as a deep well of inspiration for its

resistance to invasion. Putin has

made it clear that he considers

Ukraine to be part of greater Rus-

sia, a contention artists here say

denies Ukraine’s distinct heritage.

“With each invasion, some loss

of culture is inevitable,” said Taras

Voznyak, director of the Lviv Na-

tional Art Gallery. “Putin knows

that without art, without our his-

tory, Ukraine will have a weaker

identity. That is the whole point of

his war — to erase us and assimi-

late us into his population of

cryptofascist zombies.”

While museums often have

their own bunkers, or wider net-

works in Europe they can rely on

to house some of their art, inde-

pendent galleries and artists are

relying on each other.

One of the most successful ef-

forts to protect Ukraine’s contem-

porary art is underway in the

western city of Ivano-Frankivsk,

where an artists’ collective has

converted a subterranean cafe

into a bunker. Working day and

night with a network of van driv-

ers, the works of more than 30

artists — from delicate collages to

hanging sculptures to giant, 6-by-

14-foot paintings — have been

whisked here from all over

Ukraine. Eleven artists who fled

their homes have also been of-

fered residencies to keep produc-

ing art through the war.

“A lot of our artists are ques-

tioning their role — like, shouldn’t

I pick up a gun? Does art as a

weapon act too slowly?” said Anna

Potyomkina, 25, a curator who is

part of the collective. “But creat-

ing art when Russia is bombing

museums and studios is a big and

necessary part of the resistance.”

Except for the piles of art

swathed in bubble wrap waiting

to be taken to the bunker, the

collective is full of familiar cre-

ative culture: funky furniture, Ap-

ple computers, a shelf devoted to

books on gender and feminism,

walls covered with sticky notes

and pictures of members and

their friends looking stylish and

happy before the war.

Yaryna Shumska, a Lviv-based

performance artist and painter

who describes herself on her web-

site as a chronicler of “the memo-

ry of objects and their invisible

stories,” would love to transport

her most cherished artworks to

Ivano-Frankivsk but worries they

would get damaged in the process.

If she needs to flee Lviv, she’s likely

to leave her art where it is, and

hope the bombs fall elsewhere.

“My friend’s studio in Kharkiv

was bombed and all that’s left is an

empty catastrophe,” Shumska

said in her studio, cluttered with

enormous paintings on canvas,

some of which are dedicated to

her husband, who died in October.

“It’s an impossible question to ask

yourself: Can I say goodbye to my

work, which is almost like an ex-

tension of my body?”

The survival of so much Ukrai-

nian art will ultimately depend on

where the bombs fall.

In Odessa, Lipatov said the 123-

year-old Fine Arts Museum is so

delicate that it would surely burn

to the ground if it were hit with a

shell.

The bunker in Ivano-Frankivsk

is not bombproof either. A direct

hit would bury the hundreds of

pieces stashed there, saving only

some of them in a best-case sce-

nario. Earlier this month, Russia

bombed the city’s airport.

“Right now, this is all we can

do,” Potyomkina said. “Right now

no one is famous, no one is jeal-

ous, nobody’s art is more impor-

tant than anyone else’s. All the

rivalries and existential crises are

on hold. We have to do everything

we can right now, or else we risk

losing it all.”

Siobhán O’Grady in Kyiv contributed

to this report.

Ukraine scrambles to save precious art

As Russia continues its assault, Ukrainians unite ‘to do everything we can’ to protect cultural heritage

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sandbags surround a statue of the Duke of Richelieu in Odessa, Ukraine, earlier this month. The Frenchman was one of the city’s founders.

KASIA STREK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A portrait of Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky is the
final painting to be removed from the walls earlier this month in
the museum that is named for him in Lviv.

KASIA STREK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Anna Potyomkina wraps art in Ivano-Frankivsk. Artwork from all

over Ukraine is coming to the western city, where an artists’

collective converted a subterranean cafe into a bunker.

KASIA STREK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“If our history and heritage are to survive, all art must go

underground,” said Ihor Kozhan, director of the Sheptytsky

museum. Other museums in Ukraine have suffered huge losses.