Bird nests made with fibre-optic cables at Kyiv’s National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War
The site was discovered in Sept 2022, when Ukraine liberated the city. Because the nest contains elements of military equipment and reflects the ongoing war’s impact on the environment, it was transferred specifically to the War Museum,” said Hrynko, but.
“The war is not over: its nature, its boundaries are changing, and the front keeps shifting,” says Hrynko. “These crosses — often marked with numbers and sometimes made from baseboards — entered the museum’s collection,” Hrynko says. Russia denies its responsibility for what happened in Izium, but Hrynko says the crosses are records of war crimes.
The nest occupies a unique place in the war museum. “The museum does not specialise in ornithology; it deals with the histories of wars. In such cases, an object is an artefact and material evidence of an ever-changing military conflict. The bodies were exhumed and reburied properly. Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist who focuses on plastic pollution, is currently studying the nests. His ongoing research could establish more about the birds that built them and the effects of war on them.
One such nest, found near the village of Chorne in Kupiansk district in the Kharkiv region, is part of a larger collection at National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. The nest was discovered during a combat mission by Mykhailo Mlechko, an operator-gunner with a border guard detachment, who decided to preserve it.
Since the discovery of the first nest last year, Hrynko has seen military personnel post about other such nests on social media, though in most cases, they did not retrieve these nests.