Russia is Destroying the Crimean Heritage

Russia is Destroying the Crimean Heritage

Since 2022, Russian forces have been building trenches, shelters, and gun 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 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.

A Three-Thousand-Year-Old Landscape

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 in the landscape:

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

Consequences of the Russian Occupation

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, began organizing 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 looting through 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 gun positions running from the Perekop Isthmus to Akhtiar Bay, cutting through heritage sites wherever it meets them.

The slides that follow zoom into four of those sites.

Panske

Panske was founded in the late 5th century BCE as an outpost of 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. Thirty-two of these mounds have been excavated, their contents rich enough to trace how burial customs shifted over time from Ionian Greek traditions (brought from the eastern Aegean) to those specific to Chersonese. Among the finds is Charon’s obol: a small coin placed with the dead, intended as payment to Charon, the ferryman who in Greek belief carried souls across the river into the underworld.

Destruction of Panske Necropolis

Satellite imagery shows that a Russian military field camp, together with a ring of earthen fortifications, has been built directly on top of the necropolis. Trenches, gun positions, tent structures, and spoil heaps from the digging now cover the burial ground, with the damage concentrated inside the site’s protected boundary (outlined in white on the map).

Beliaus

Founded in the 4th century BCE, Beliaus was a Greek coastal fortress, built to control shipping routes along Crimea’s western coast. At its center stood a monumental lighthouse tower, 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 use. Greek Chersonese, 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 more than once, until Roman troops finally destroyed the settlement for good in 63 CE.

Mapping the Destruction of the Fortress

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

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

The second is military construction. Starting from 2022, on the northern estate, shelters dug into the ground have damaged walls dating to the 3rd century BCE. In the western part of the settlement, trenches and gun positions have cut through the cultural layer, destroying Scythian-era structures from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. And in the necropolis, the movement of military vehicles and the construction of fortifications have likely destroyed Scythian burial crypts once used by generations of the same families.

Scale of Destruction of Beliaus

The 3D 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 gun emplacement 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 of occupation is gone with the soil that held it.

Kulchuk

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

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, these had been replaced by fortified estates, each protected by its own tower (Towers No. 1 and No. 3). In the early 3rd century, the separate estates were unified into a single defensive system organised around Estate No. 2 at its core. And in the 2nd century BCE, after Scythians took control of the site, they added a rampart and a defensive ditch around it.

Heritage Losses at Kulchuk

Russian trenches and gun emplacements have been dug directly into the settlement, destroying specific structures that anchored each phase of its history.

In the earliest quarter (Estate No. 1, 4th century BCE), the remains of Tower No. 1 and the surrounding buildings were destroyed, erasing the physical evidence of the site’s oldest phase. At Estate No. 2, the southern wall and the earliest Greek semi-dugout houses have been lost, making it impossible to reconstruct how the settlement was first founded. In the Western Estate, the ground around Tower No. 3 has been cut through, destroying the cultural layer together with Scythian-period structures built on top of the Greek ones. Further out, stretches of the Scythian rampart and ditch, the outer ring of the site’s defenses, have also been damaged.

The pattern, taken together, is that each period of Kulchuk’s history has lost some of its physical evidence at once. There is a grim irony in this: Russian fortifications have destroyed ancient fortifications that stood here for more than two thousand years.

Kulchuk Model

The 3D model brings the scale of the damage into view. Gun 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. The outer Scythian rampart and ditch, which once ringed the whole site, are 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 exactly the logic that shaped it as a fortress in the first place, and its archaeology is being destroyed in the process.

Ust-Alma

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. Finds 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.

Destruction of Hillfort and Necropolis

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, gun 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 gun emplacements have been dug directly into the burial ground, alongside a clearly visible looting pit. Military vehicles moving across the ground have crushed the tops of earthen crypts below. These crypts held 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.

Destruction of Burial Sites

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, Barrow No. 746. 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, together with 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.

Legal Assessment and Conclusions

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 illegal excavations. It has also unlawfully transferred artifacts out of occupied territory. By placing gun 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 and into the Middle Ages. Each trench cut through a burial mound, each gun emplacement dug into a cultural layer, removes evidence that cannot be recovered. This map documents that loss.

This 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.