Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack on Kyiv overnight on 15 June that set fire to the Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the UNESCO-listed Orthodox monastery founded nearly 1,000 years ago, killing at least five people in the capital.
Flames spread across about 800 square metres of the cathedral roof, Ukraine's emergency service said, as crews worked beneath the monastery's golden domes to bring the blaze under control. Monks and museum staff carried relics and exhibits out of the complex. While firefighters fought the fire, a second strike hit the nearby Mystetskyi Arsenal museum complex, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
The Lavra, founded in 1051 and venerated by Orthodox believers in both Ukraine and Russia, came under direct fire for only the second time in Russia's full-scale invasion, the Kyiv Independent reported, and for the third time since the Second World War. Ukrainian officials said at least five people were killed and dozens injured in Kyiv, among them a pregnant woman and two children aged 5 and 6. Separately, five rescue workers were killed in Kharkiv while responding to an earlier strike, officials said.
Ukraine's Air Force said Russia fired 611 long-range drones and 70 missiles across the country during the night. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the attack cut power to about 140,000 households in northern Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the site and called the attack "one of Russia's most serious crimes against Christian culture to date." He pressed Ukraine's allies for more air defence and tougher pressure on Moscow ahead of a Group of Seven summit in France this week.
Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, described the strike as "another Russian crime against humanity, against history and against Christianity" and asked for prayers for the shrine. Retired US Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg compared the attack to the German bombing of St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1940, writing that he could see no military necessity for it. "There is none," he said.
Russia denied targeting the monastery. Its Defence Ministry said it had struck "targets within the defence-industrial complex" in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, and claimed without evidence that the site was hit by an outdated US-made missile.
Culture Minister Tetiana Berezhna said the Lavra holds Enhanced Protection under the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, calling the strike "one of the gravest crimes against the world's cultural heritage." Deliberately directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, art and historic monuments is defined as a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. MP Solomiia Bobrovska described the attack as a barbaric war crime.
The ICC has an open investigation into the situation in Ukraine and in March 2023 issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute and rejects the court's jurisdiction.
The Dormition Cathedral was destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt only after Ukraine regained independence, with restoration completed in the late 1990s. The wider monastery, a cave complex holding the relics of dozens of saints, was administered for centuries through the Moscow Patriarchate's Ukrainian branch. In 2022 and 2023 monks linked to the Russian church were evicted from the site, accused of ties to Moscow.
Cultural figures listed a wider toll from the same 24 hours, including fires at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the Organ Hall in Dnipro and the Kharkiv Art Museum, and the loss of a costume collection at the Dovzhenko Film Studio.
For governments meeting in France this week, including Canada and European Union members, Zelensky's request lands on familiar ground: more interceptors to stop the drones and missiles, and stronger enforcement of sanctions already weighing on Russia's war economy. The EU and Canada both maintain restrictive measures against Moscow, and both are parties to the Hague Convention the strike is said to have breached. Readers in those countries can press elected representatives to back air-defence transfers and support the documentation of heritage destruction by UNESCO and the Ukrainian prosecutors building war-crimes cases.
The Lavra marks its 975th anniversary this year. On Monday its clergy were carrying icons and church inventory through the smoke, salvaging what they could from a roof still alight
