A special inter-committee working group on the protection of cultural heritage sites is being created in the Verkhovna Rada, Head of the committee on the organization of state power, local self-government, regional development and urban planning, Olena Shuliak (Servant of the People party) said.

As Shuliak told Interfax-Ukraine, the task of the special working group is to develop legislative changes that will help solve the problem of arbitrary destruction of monuments, which, although aggravated as a result of Russian armed aggression, is not new for Ukraine due to the actions of developers and dubious decisions of local councils.

"It is important for our country to prevent the destruction of cultural heritage monuments at the legislative level. In Kyiv, dozens of facilities became the target of encroachments by unscrupulous developers last year. Now the estate 1893 on 18 Mykhailivska Street, a 140-year-old architectural monument – the house of Osip Rodin, is under threat on 71 Honchara Street, a 150-year-old cultural heritage site located on 2/21/19 Voloshska Street. Kyiv City Council, in turn, periodically supports the demolition of architectural monuments to allocate land for development," the head of the committee said.

The working group will include members of the parliamentary committee on the organization of state power, local self-government, regional development and urban planning, as well as the committee on humanitarian and information policy. In addition, MPs, representatives of the Verkhovna Rada apparatus, the Ministry of Development of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure (Ministry of Reconstruction), the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, the President's Office, central and local authorities, as well as specialized associations, scientists and experts will be involved in its work in the field of cultural heritage.

"Our goal is to find all legislative loopholes that allow the destruction of landmarks for the sake of new construction. Find, eliminate them and formulate a new, clear and understandable legislative field without cracks to bypass it," Shuliak said.

She said the need to develop legislative changes to solve problems and challenges in the field of protection of cultural heritage has been repeatedly discussed both in the relevant ministries and with the public. Moreover, in recent years, it was thanks to public publicity that the destruction of some important monuments was prevented.

In addition to the developments of new legislation that provides a decent level of protection for cultural heritage sites, it is necessary to create conditions for the synchronization of the Unified State Electronic System in the field of construction as part of the electronic urban planning cadastre with the State Register of Immovable (Tangible) Monuments of Ukraine, work on the creation of which has been ongoing for about two years, noted in the statement. At the end of last year, the developers presented their developments for it – an information and communication system, the filling of which is now being completed by the regional state administrations. They enter the memos themselves and the accounting data for each of them, and check the availability of the necessary documentation for them.

"For this system to become a full-fledged register, into which anyone can go and view data on a particular attraction, a colossal amount of work still needs to be done. First of all, enter all the memos and documentation on them into it, then the data on the memos from paper media will need to be checked for accuracy, that is, verified. It is also necessary to legalize the procedure for maintaining this register so that extracts from it can be used to carry out management activities (for land managers, construction projects, protection of cultural heritage, etc.), and to develop the necessary by-laws for this," the MP said.