The cathedral of Saint Sophia and the monastery building in Kiev will be included in the list of endangered world heritage in mid-September, as well as the historical center of Lviv, in the west of Ukraine, due to the Russian invasion of that country, UNESCO learned today.
"Those places are under threat of destruction. There have been attacks on the buffer zones of those sites and we don't know what will happen in the future," said World Heritage Director Lazar Elundu, to AFP in Paris, where the UN Education Organization is headquartered. science and culture (UNESCO).
The World Heritage Committee, which is meeting from September 10 to 25 in Riyadh, will "probably" make that decision based on the opinion of experts that the two sites are in a "proven dangerous situation", he added.
Those two locations will be added to the list of endangered world heritage, where the central part of Odessa is already located, several of whose buildings were destroyed at the end of July in "brutal Russian strikes", UNESCO said.
At the beginning of July, a historical building was targeted in Lviv, which, according to UNESCO, still represents the "first" attack since the beginning of the conflict on a zone protected by the Convention on World Heritage, and therefore the first "violation" of that convention to which Russia is a signatory.
UNESCO records damage to 270 Ukrainian cultural objects since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
The Cathedral of Saint Sophia, located in the historical center of Kyiv, is one of the main monuments representing architecture and art from the beginning of the 11th century in Ukraine, UNESCO said.
Since 1990, that temple has been registered as a World Heritage Site, as well as the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, which is an architectural set of monastic buildings founded at the same time and located on a hill above the Dnieper River.
The historical center of Lviv, a city founded in the Middle Ages, was included in the World Heritage List in 1996.
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