Head of the State Archival Service of Ukraine Anatoliy Khromov believes that the state has done more in 2022 than in 2014 to preserve archives during the aggression.

"It's impossible to do everything… At the same time, I want to say that the state did more in 2022 than in 2014, when during the occupation of Crimea and part of Donbas, virtually everything that was left in those territories, was lost," Khromov said in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine agency, answering the question whether the state did everything to preserve the archives during the war.

According to him, there are 86 million storage units of the national archival fund in Ukraine, which are located in various state archives: central, regional, sectoral, district, and there are also long-term storage documents in the archives regarding salaries, pensions and other payments, which, in case of war, also need to be evacuated, and besides, there are documents in private collections.

"Therefore, the task of preserving each document is, in fact, impossible, especially when there is a war," the official said.

He also said that the regulatory framework on how to act in emergency situations is defined, but as practice has shown, it is quite far from reality.

"According to the methodological recommendations, safe regions should be determined where documents can be transported... But at the very first point, when the State Archival Service made a request to the Ministry of Defense to determine safe regions, we never received an answer. I don't know why the Defense agency didn't respond, but perhaps because there are no actual safe regions. The practice of the war showed that every region was shelled," the official said.

According to him, transport arteries are also the place of greatest danger for both people and documents, so evacuation is not always a 100% panacea for protecting funds.

"Therefore, when we were engaged in evacuation, we used an individual approach for every case. We talked with the heads of regional military administrations, in particular in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, agreed with their colleagues in the central and western regions of Ukraine, and determined, even without the decision of the Ministry of Defense, that we would transport funds there," Khromov said.

At the same time, he drew attention to another problem - the fact that the state has not created a proper archival infrastructure for ten years.

"Even without a war, all storage facilities were full. And counting on ability of the west of Ukraine to accept all the documents from the rest of Ukraine, when the storage facilities there are already full, was unlikely. Therefore, as a rule, archival documents mostly remained in buildings, but we instructed that all of them be transferred to storage," Khromov said.