On the night of June 15, during a massive attack on Kyiv, Russia carried out targeted strikes against the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. As a result of the attack, the roof of the central Dormition Cathedral caught fire.

According to NV, Russian forces launched a massive strike against Ukraine overnight using 611 unmanned aerial vehicles and 70 missiles, including Tsirkon missiles and Iskander ballistic missiles. Powerful explosions were heard across Kyiv. Five people were reported killed and 35 injured.

The fire on the roof of the burning Dormition Cathedral was extinguished at 8:35 a.m.

According to the abbot of the Lavra, Bishop Avraamii of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the coordinated actions of the monastery brethren, together with the dedicated work of emergency responders and firefighting units, helped minimize risks to people and preserve the holy sites. Efforts to eliminate the consequences of the attack are ongoing. Damage assessments are being conducted and all circumstances of the incident are being documented.

“Once again, we are witnessing the barbaric actions of Russians, for whom nothing is sacred. While calling themselves Orthodox Christians, they strike at the heart of our people and at the holy sites that we preserve,” Avraamii said.

Metropolitan Epifanii, Primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, described the Russian strike on the Dormition Cathedral as a crime against humanity, history, and Christianity.

“What more must the Kremlin antichrist do before the world realizes that decisive action is needed to stop Russian terror against Ukraine and against the very principles of peace? Most Holy Mother of God, stop Herod!” Metropolitan Epifanii wrote on X.

According to Maksym Ostapenko, Director General of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Preserve, the shelling that took place overnight caused very serious damage to numerous sites.

“At least five sites of national significance and several sites of local significance have been damaged. The Dormition Cathedral has suffered the greatest damage so far. The strike hit the Stepanivskyi Chapel directly and caused a major fire. Overall, it can be stated that these attacks were deliberately directed against the shrines of Orthodoxy and Christianity, which will mark their 975th anniversary this year,” Ostapenko said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while inspecting the damage at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, stated that Ukraine would respond to the massive Russian attack.

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra holds three international protection statuses. Since 1990 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site and since 2023 it has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger.

The site is also included in the International List of Cultural Property under Enhanced Protection. It is protected under the mechanism established by the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra was founded in 1051 as a cave monastery, at that time located outside Kyiv.

Over the centuries, the monastery endured numerous raids, devastations, and acts of plunder by the Cumans in the eleventh century, the hordes of Batu Khan in the thirteenth century, and Mengli I Giray in the fifteenth century, among others. Nevertheless, it never lost its role in the world of Orthodox Christianity. In 1592, the monastery was recognized as a stavropegion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, meaning an autonomous ecclesiastical unit under the direct jurisdiction of Constantinople.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Muscovite state effectively annexed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and succeeded in establishing control over it as an autocephalous unit of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

During the Red Terror in January 1918, Bolsheviks tortured and executed Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and Halych near the walls of the Lavra. In 1920, the monastery was closed.

During the Second World War, in 1941, Soviet forces blew up the Holy Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, originally built at the end of the eleventh century. Soviet propaganda blamed the crime on the Nazis, and the church remained in ruins.

Monastic life and worship at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra resumed only in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although all buildings of the Lavra belong to the state, in 2011 the Cabinet of Ministers transferred 75 properties in the Lower Lavra to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for free and indefinite use.

Since 2023, the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine has conducted services in some churches of the Lavra. A monastery of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is currently active there.