Russia is Destroying the Crimean Heritage

Since 2022, Russian forces have been building trenches, shelters, and firing positions along Crimea’s western coast. These fortifications cut directly through archaeological sites dating back up to 3,000 years, destroying burial mounds, city walls, and buried layers that record the entire history of the region.

This interactive map documents that destruction site by site. It draws on spatial analysis conducted by the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST) in partnership with the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies (CISS), combining satellite imagery, 3D terrain modeling, and archaeological records.

Western Crimea has been continuously inhabited since the Bronze Age. Over three millennia, indigenous Tauri, Scythian nomads, Greek colonists, Romans, and medieval Turkic peoples each left their mark, producing one of the world’s most layered cultural landscapes. Every period left traces on the landscape:

• The Bronze and Early Iron Age: burial mounds of the Tarkhankut Peninsula’s earliest inhabitants.
• The Scythian era: royal tombs near Donuzlav Lake.
• The Greek colonization: Chersonese and its chain of coastal fortresses.
• The Settled Scythian period: fortified towns and burial grounds between the Alma and Kacha Rivers, including Ust-Alma.
• The Roman period: Roman garrisons such as Kara-Tobe.
• The Middle Ages: Greek cities decline, and the region passes into the orbit of nomadic peoples, including the Polovtsians (Cumans).

Since 2014, this layered landscape has come under threat. Russian authorities unilaterally entered Crimean heritage sites into their own state register and, in violation of Ukrainian and international law, organized state-run excavations on occupied territory. What they take from the ground, they claim as Russian.

After 2022, heritage protection was dismantled more openly. Russian government Resolution No. 2418, adopted in 2023, permits earthworks in Crimea without any prior archaeological assessment. In practice, this legalizes the destruction of the cultural layer: a trench can now be cut through a three-thousand-year-old burial ground with no obligation to record or even acknowledge what is there.

The damage takes two forms. The first is unauthorized excavation, carried out since 2014 at Beliaus, Kulchuk, and Ust-Alma. The second is the fortification program itself, a continuous line of trenches, shelters, and firing positions running from the Perekop Isthmus to Akhtiar Bay, cutting through heritage sites wherever they intersect.

Dotted blue lines designate protective zones of monuments, which are intended to safeguard the monument from any unauthorized interventions, as well as negative anthropogenic and natural impacts.

The slides that follow zoom into four of those sites.

Panske 1 was founded in the late 5th century BCE as an outpost of Pontic Olbia, another Greek colony on the northern Black Sea coast. Around 360 BCE, it passed under the control of Chersonese. Unusually for the region, it was laid out as a planned cluster of large, monumental estates rather than a loose village.

Alongside the settlement lies its burial ground, a field of tumuli—earthen burial mounds raised over graves—enclosed by low ramparts. In the course of time, the cultures of settlements and burials shifted here: Ionian Greek traditions brought from the eastern Aegean to those specific to Chersonese.

Satellite imagery shows that a Russian military field camp and a ring of earthen fortifications has been built directly on top of the necropolis. Trenches, firing positions, tent structures, and spoil heaps from the excavations cover the burial ground, with the damage concentrated inside the site’s protected boundary.

Founded in the 4th century BCE, Beliaus was a Greek coastal fortress, built to control shipping routes along Crimea’s western coast. A monumental lighthouse tower stood in its center, and clusters of fortified estates were reinforced with low stone barriers designed to stop battering rams.

The site changed hands repeatedly. In the 2nd century BCE, Scythians captured the fortress and rebuilt its residential quarters for their own purpose. The Greek city-state of Chersonesos, unable to hold the coast alone, called on Mithridates VI of Pontus for help; his army fought a series of campaigns against the Scythians at the end of that century, during which Beliaus was destroyed. Scythians reoccupied the ruins multiple times until Roman troops finally destroyed the settlement in 63 CE.

During the Russian occupation of Crimea, the site was damaged in two evident ways.

Firstly, in 2014–2016, 2019, and 2023, the occupation administration carried out unauthorized archaeological excavations at Beliaus and its necropolis, removing finds without a scientific record.

Secondly, starting from 2022, on the northern estate, Russian shelters dug into the ground have damaged walls dating to the 3rd century BCE. In the western part of the settlement, trenches and firing positions have cut through the cultural layer, destroying Scythian-era structures from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. In the necropolis, the movement of military vehicles and the construction of fortifications have likely destroyed Scythian burial crypts that served as ancestral family vaults.

The 3D model shows the extent of damage, how deep it goes and how it spreads across different zones of the site.

A long trench line runs along the inland edge of the fortress, tracing the upper boundary of the ancient settlement and cutting through the cultural layer where Greek and later Scythian structures once stood. North of it, a firing position and a scatter of soil dumps mark a secondary position set back from the site. To the east, a second trench reaches into the area of the necropolis.

The settlement’s outer edges, its approaches, and its burial ground are all pierced by military infrastructure. Once the cultural layer is destroyed in this way, it cannot be restored: the evidence of two-and-a-half thousand years is gone with the soil that held it.

Kulchuk was founded in the 4th century BCE on a coastal cliff whose natural defenses made it an ideal fortress. What began as a small economic outpost grew into one of the most heavily fortified settlements on the Tarkhankut coast over roughly two centuries.

Its growth can be read in four phases. In the mid-4th century BCE, the first settlers lived in semi-dugout dwellings, houses partly sunk into the ground for shelter and insulation. By the late 4th to early 3rd century BCE, these had been replaced by fortified estates, each protected by its own tower. In the early 3rd century BCE, the separate estates were unified into a single defensive system organised around an estate at its core. In the 2nd century BCE, Scythians took control of the site and added a rampart and a defensive ditch around it.

By digging trenches and locating firing emplacements directly in the settlement, Russian forces have destroyed the remains of architectural structures that anchored each episode of Kulchuk’s history.

There is a grim irony in this: Russian military construction has destroyed ancient fortifications that stood here for more than two thousand years.

The 3D model brings the scale of the damage into view. Firing emplacements press up against the coastal edge of the hillfort in an almost continuous line, following the natural cliff. Inland, a second band of emplacements and soil dumps cuts across the settlement’s interior, falling directly on top of the estates and towers that defined its phases of growth. Having once ringed the whole site, the outer Scythian rampart and ditch are now pierced in several places.

Read together, the emplacements form a perimeter that mirrors the ancient one, tracing the same cliff-line and the same approaches the Greeks and Scythians fortified in turn. Kulchuk is being militarised along the logic that shaped it as a fortress in ancient times, and its archaeology is being destroyed in the current process.

Ust-Alma is the largest Late Scythian hillfort in Southwestern Crimea, likely the ancient city of Palakion. It stood on high ground at the mouth of the Alma River from the end of the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, functioning as a fortified settlement and a trading port with a citadel at its core.

It is best known for its necropolis, the burial ground of the Sarmatian nobility who ruled here in the early centuries CE. The dead were placed in earthen crypts cut into the ground, and funerary rites included the burial of horses alongside their owners. Artefacts from these graves—gold jewelry, weapons, and ceremonial objects—toured European museums in Germany and the Netherlands in the exhibition Crimea: The Golden Island in the Black Sea. Those artifacts have since been returned to Ukraine and are now held at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv.

Russian fortification works have damaged every major part of the site.

On the hillfort itself, construction activity has cut into the Scythian rampart and ditch (2nd–1st centuries BCE), the outer defensive ring that once enclosed the settlement. Inside, firing positions and soil dumps have destroyed the cultural layer in the center of the site, together with the remains of residential buildings that stood here between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE.

The heaviest damage is in the necropolis. Clusters of trenches and firing positions have been dug directly into the burial ground, alongside clearly visible evidence of unauthorized archaeological excavations. Military vehicles moving across the ground have crushed the tops of earthen crypts. These crypts hold the kinds of finds that once traveled to European museums, and those still in the ground are now at serious risk of being destroyed before they can be recorded.

Beyond the main necropolis, the wider landscape around Ust-Alma is dotted with barrows: large earthen mounds raised over individual burials, some of them thousands of years older than the hillfort itself. One group of these mounds stands on the left bank of the Alma River.

Between 2022 and 2025, trenches were cut directly through one of them. The central burial, likely belonging to the Kemi-Oba culture of the Early Bronze Age and more than four thousand years old, has been partially or fully destroyed, as well as the graves around it. With the soil layers cut apart, the stratigraphy that would allow archaeologists to date and interpret the burial is gone, and with it the context that gave the finds their meaning.

What Russian forces are doing in Crimea clearly violates international law. Russia has illegally appropriated Crimean heritage sites by entering them into its own state register. It has damaged and destroyed many of them through the construction of military infrastructure and unauthorized excavations. It has also unlawfully transferred artifacts out of occupied territory. By placing firing positions and trenches inside protected cultural sites, Russia has turned them into military targets in breach of the protections those sites carry.

These actions engage Russia’s responsibility as a state under several bodies of international law:

• The Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, annexed to Hague Convention IV (1907);
• The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict;
• Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions;
• The 1972 World Heritage Convention;
• Customary international law.

The same conduct also engages the individual criminal responsibility of Russian officials and military personnel under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The historical landscape of Western Crimea is a layered record of three thousand years of continuous human presence from the Early Iron Age through Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages. Each trench cut through a burial mound and each firing position dug into a cultural layer removes evidence that cannot be recovered. This map documents that loss.

The map is based on spatial analysis conducted by the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST) in partnership with the NGO “Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies” (CISS), with support from the International Renaissance Foundation, as part of the “Heritage Witness: Spatial Documentation of Crimes in Crimea” project.