A Russian drone strike has destroyed the Holy Vvedenska (Presentation) Church in Beryslav, in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, over the weekend of 1–2 August 2026. The church, built in 1725, burned to the ground after being hit. Ukrainian officials say it was the country's last remaining example of 18th-century wooden Cossack architecture (The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2026).

Oleksandr Alchiev, head of the Beryslav City Military Administration, confirmed the loss in a Facebook post on 3 August. He described the church as "a unique architectural monument of national significance" and "an integral part of Beryslav's history for almost three centuries." According to Alchiev, the church was built in 1725 using oak timber taken from the Perevolochna fortress of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks — a major Cossack stronghold on the Dnipro River — and constructed without a single nail. It was transported along the Dnipro to Beryslav in 1784 (The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2026).

The Kherson Oblast State Administration reported that the church caught fire and was completely destroyed after the strike (Hromadske, 4 August 2026; Ukrainska Pravda, 3 August 2026). Beryslav, a historic settlement in the Kherson region, was liberated from Russian occupation but remains under constant bombardment.

The Kherson news site Most reported that the church remained under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is historically affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate — the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church (The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2026).

This is not the first Cossack-era heritage site lost to a drone strike this year. In April 2026, a Russian drone destroyed the Dontsiv-Zakharzhevsky Manor in the Kharkiv region, the estate of a prominent Cossack family (The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2026; Kyiv Post).

Skeiron, a Lviv-based cultural heritage organisation that creates 3D digital scans of monuments, has appealed on social media for photographs of the destroyed church. The group wants to build a digital model of the building from crowd-sourced images — the kind of virtual reconstruction that has become a practical response to wartime loss, since no physical restoration of a burned wooden structure is possible (The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2026).

The church had stood for 301 years. It survived the collapse of the Cossack polity, two world wars, and Soviet rule. It did not survive a single drone.