Exhibits pay homage to Ukrainians’ resilience and bring home the reality that war is going on in Europe
Descending into the windowless basement of a second world war air-raid bunker built for civilians in central Berlin is arguably an eerie enough evocation of what it means to endure life in a conflict.
But in a modern twist, before they have even walked into the first room of the city’s new Ukraine Museum inside the bunker, visitors are “targeted” by a Russian drone just before its operator prepares to release the lethal shot, and see themselves in the firing line on the screen of the weapon’s camera.
“We want to show people something of the physical reality of the conflict,” says Wieland Giebel, one of the museum’s curators. “We hope to bring it home to them that this is a war going on here and now in Europe, and that we ignore it at our peril.”
The museum opened in the same week as the fourth anniversary of the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It has been created from remnants of the war, and assembled with the help of the National Military History Museum in Kyiv and frontline troops from the 7th Rapid Response Corps in Pokrovsk.
