The first sound
At 5 a.m. on May 24, employees at Kyiv’s Chernobyl Museum heard the thud of what was almost certainly an Iskander missile.
In wartime Kyiv, a thud is never just a sound. It is a question. Where did it hit? Who was hurt? What is burning?
Within moments, word began to spread. The missile had struck the Chernobyl Museum, which had reopened to the public barely four weeks earlier.
The weapon itself was almost grotesquely expensive. An Iskander-M missile is estimated to cost about $2.4 million, meaning Russia had spent millions to strike a museum whose purpose was to preserve evidence, memory, and truth.
“I arrived to the museum at 5:20 a.m., 20 minutes after I was told about the attack,” Vitalina Martynovska, the museum director, told me. “After that, we had to wait for the permission to enter the building from firefighters and explosives experts before we could start our evacuation efforts. We understood that we did not have a lot of time and we had to move very quickly.”
Rescuing and saving the museum’s artifacts wasn’t easy. Water poured through shattered windows. Glass covered the floors. Smoke drifted through galleries that only hours earlier had held some of the most important records of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
For three frantic hours, the staff worked while the building continued to smolder around them. Their efforts were cut short when the firefighters ordered them to evacuate immediately, explaining that the walls and floor beams had become unstable and could give way at any moment.
Even so, staff members managed to save approximately 23,000 artifacts before they were forced out of the building. Still, the building that had housed one of Ukraine’s most important museums was now a ruin. The missile had not merely struck a building — it had struck at memory itself.
A loss beyond Ukraine
The loss reaches far beyond Ukraine. The Chernobyl Museum preserved the story of an event that changed the course of modern history. The 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant contaminated vast areas of Europe, exposed the failures of the Soviet system, and helped undermine public confidence in the Soviet government. Some historians argue that Chernobyl contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
Inside the museum were more than exhibits. There were official documents, photographs, personal effects, artwork, eyewitness accounts, and records collected over decades. Together, they helped explain not only what happened on the night of the explosion but also how the Kremlin acted in the face of a nuclear catastrophe, how secrecy triumphed over transparency, and how ordinary people were forced to bear the consequences.
“It is civilizational heritage,” Martynovska said.
The fire continued until early afternoon. For six days afterward, workers removed debris so that additional materials could be recovered.
The devastation was especially bitter because the museum had opened less than a month before the attack. It was giving visitors a way to understand the Chernobyl catastrophe, not as distant Soviet history, but as a living warning about secrecy, negligence, and power without accountability.
Why this museum?
Standing amid the wreckage, Martynovska reflected on a question that has troubled many Ukrainians since the attack: Why did the Russians target this museum?
One possibility is simple. Russia has repeatedly attacked civilian and cultural sites throughout the war. The museum may have been another victim of a broader campaign that has damaged churches, libraries, schools, theaters, and museums across Ukraine.
But museum officials suspect there could be another reason. Among the museum’s collections were documents that shed light on Soviet knowledge of safety problems at Chernobyl before the disaster occurred.
According to Martynovska, the records showed multiple occasions when officials knew the facility faced serious risks yet failed to take corrective action. The Museum’s documents exposed warnings, internal concerns, and decisions that in hindsight appear beyond reckless.
The records also illuminated another chapter of the story: the effort to conceal the disaster after the reactor exploded. The Soviets initially tried to conceal the nuclear reactor’s meltdown, but after radioactive particles began drifting across Europe, secrecy became impossible.
“The documents showed what people in the Kremlin knew,” Martynovska said.
Whether the museum was deliberately targeted because of those records may never be proven. Yet the possibility carries a bitter historical irony.
The Soviet system helped create the Chernobyl disaster through secrecy and denial. Four decades later, a museum dedicated to preserving the lessons of that catastrophe was itself devastated during a war launched by the Soviet Union’s successor state.
The attack, therefore, represents more than physical destruction.
What memory protects
Museums exist because civilizations understand that memory matters. They preserve evidence that future generations may need. They protect uncomfortable truths that powerful people would sometimes prefer forgotten.
The Chernobyl Museum did exactly that.
It preserved the stories of engineers, firefighters, liquidators, evacuees, scientists, and ordinary families whose lives were forever altered by a nuclear catastrophe.
Now the museum itself has become part of the history it was created to explain.
Visitors can no longer walk through its galleries. The exhibits are gone. The building’s future remains uncertain. Engineers have not yet determined whether it can be rebuilt or whether demolition will be necessary.
Yet amid the destruction, there is one encouraging fact.
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The people entrusted with preserving history refused to abandon it. As missiles fell, as smoke filled the rooms, and as firefighters battled flames, museum staff carried armloads of artifacts into safety.
The building may have been shattered. The memory it protected survives.
Mitzi Perdue is a journalist and war correspondent. She has reported extensively from Ukraine and is the co-founder of Mental Help Global, an initiative using AI to expand access to mental health support in conflict-affected regions.