The Museum collection contains more than 416,000 items related to the Second World War and other armed conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries in Ukraine and with the participation of Ukrainians.
The collection began to form in the 1940s, long before the Museum was officially established. Initially, it focused mainly on the military actions and the participants of the Second World War. It included the samples of weapons, uniforms, photographs, and personal belongings of participants from various military and paramilitary formations of different countries on the Eastern Front. Gradually, the collection expanded including personal belongings of notable individuals and artifacts that represented the themes of local wars and armed conflicts of the 20th century.
Since the 1990s until today, a significant influence for the replenishment and research of the Museum collection is carried through the socio-humanitarian aspects of war – particularly personal stories of armed and unarmed people who found themselves at the epicenter of two world wars, who were affected by tyrannical regimes or became victims of genocide. Despite all these challenges, they resisted the aggressor physically or spiritually. Moreover, in extremely difficult and mostly unfavorable situation, they followed a path of sacrifice in the struggle for independence and sovereignty of Ukraine in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The section “Collections” presents vivid, unique in content and in form samples of clothes, weapons, uniforms, documents, photographs, phaleristic, vexillological, bonistic and numismatic artifacts, philatelic and antiquarian objects, as well as artistic works of the modern military history of Ukraine.
You can get acquainted with the previous version of the digital collections at this link.
