Faced with the constant threat of shelling, residents in Ukraine’s cultural capital are doing what they can to protect their city’s historic landmarks.
Statues around the western Ukraine city of Lviv can be seen completely covered, while stained glass windows are boarded up.
Efforts to protect these and other important monuments come as the recent escalation in the country’s war with Russia enters its fourth week.
"Those who destroy the past, they have no future," Diana Borysenko, owner of DianaTours Western Ukraine and a member of the Lviv Tourism Alliance, told CTV National News Washington Bureau Chief Joy Malbon.
"It’s like forgetting about your grandparents, about your ancestors. These are your roots. This is where you come from."
Lviv joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998. Founded in the late Middle Ages, it holds most of Ukraine’s historic and architectural monuments and is known for its history as a religious and cultural centre in the country, inspired by its different ethnic communities.
While much of the fighting in Ukraine is taking place in the country’s east and around the capital Kyiv, the "feeling of war is everywhere, in every corner of Ukraine," Borysenko says.
"People are desperate and they do not understand what kind of vandal you have to be, what kind of cruel creature you have to be, to be killing kids, to be killing people who are staying in a queue to buy bread, to be killing a family who’s escxjmtzywaping to the west, I have no words to explain," she said. "It’s very painful."
The city has remained largely peaceful, although air raid sirens go off every night warning residents about possible missile strikes.
Borysenko also can’t help but look at what is happening in Kyiv, or the devastation in the Kharkiv to the northeast and Mariupol in the southeast.
"I think unfortunately, this generation that will survive the war — and we’ll not only survive it we’ll win this war, because God is with us, and we will not give away our land, that piece of our land — so this generation that grows up with the war, they will not be able to forgive all these atrocities," she said.
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A wrapped sculpture on a city street in Lviv, western Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Pavlo Palamarchuk)
