Ukraine's prosecutor general has charged a Russian lieutenant general in absentia with ordering the missile strike that badly damaged the Hryhoriy Skovoroda National Literary Memorial Museum in the Kharkiv region in the spring of 2022.

The officer, who is from the village of Chuhuiv in Kharkiv Oblast, commands Russia's 6th Guards Air and Air Defense Forces Army, according to the prosecutor general's office. Prosecutors say the general knew for certain that he was attacking a monument of Ukrainian culture rather than a military target, and gave the order to destroy it anyway. The charge was reported by The Kyiv Independent, which cited the prosecutor general's announcement.

The museum was dedicated to the 18th-century philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, a thinker steeped in the Socratic method, and was housed in the estate where he spent the final years of his life and died in 1794. It was one of many cultural institutions damaged or destroyed during the war. After the attack, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russian army had deployed a missile to destroy the museum, adding: "A missile—to destroy a museum."

Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine's cultural heritage since the full-scale invasion began, The Kyiv Independent reported. According to data collected by the Culture Ministry, 2,161 cultural heritage sites and 2,665 cultural institutions in Ukraine had been damaged or destroyed as of September 2026. The Skovoroda case is one of the most prominent attempts to hold a senior Russian commander personally accountable for the destruction of a cultural site.