On May 21, the Cabinet of Ministers approved a new procedure for determining the boundaries and usage regimes of protection zones for cultural heritage sites. The key change is an individual approach: protection zones and construction conditions near monuments can now be established separately for each object, rather than using a single template.

What changes in practice

Previously, protection zones were either not established at all, or existed in the form of Soviet standards that did not account for modern development. The Resolution allows determining the size of protection zones that will best contribute to the protection of monuments while also allowing reconstruction and new construction without harm to cultural heritage.

Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko linked the decision to the context of the full-scale war:

«Russia deliberately destroys monuments, museums and cultural institutions, trying to erase historical memory and the connection between generations. Therefore, the protection of cultural heritage and support for culture are strategically important for Ukraine during the war».

Yulia Svyrydenko, Telegram

The official logic is clear: after deoccupation, thousands of damaged buildings will require restoration, and rigid universal protection zones will hinder this. Now it is possible to determine individual usage regimes for territories around monuments — in particular regarding height and construction conditions.

Where the risk lies

The problem is that «flexibility» in this area already has a documented history of abuse. Officials at the Department of Cultural Heritage Protection groundlessly excluded buildings from the list of cultural heritage objects, closed the database of city monuments, did not install protective plaques and did not monitor buildings for their preservation.

Court practice shows that «developers would now queue up to challenge the monument status in court, which would cause us to lose more than a hundred cultural heritage objects», — as lawyer Oleksandr Dyadyuk described the situation around Kyiv monuments. A precedent in favor of the public was established through the courts — but each time it is a separate battle.

The new procedure does not contain a publicly described mechanism for challenging individual decisions about zone boundaries: who and how can dispute a decision if a protection zone is established too narrowly under a specific development project — this does not follow from the text of the resolution.

Context: Zhytomyr as a warning

The Supreme Court has already considered a situation where the city council suspended the boundaries and usage regimes of monument protection zones and recognized such a decision as lawful — because the procedure was followed. However, in the same ruling, the court identified violations of the deadlines for making changes to the master plan. That is, even with existing norms, the boundary between lawful regulation and manipulation lies in procedural details that are difficult to track from the outside.

• Positive: a single procedure instead of Soviet standards and chaotic «manual mode» decisions
• Risk: individual decisions without transparent appeals create space for developer pressure on local heritage protection authorities
• Unknown: what role public participation and UNESCO will have in approving zones for sites with world heritage status

If within a year after the resolution comes into effect, the Ministry of Culture does not publish a register of established zones in open access — the new procedure will become not a protection of heritage, but a more convenient way to bypass it.