Backup Ukraine
—Søren la Cour Jensen, chair of Blue Shield Denmark
What happens when your country is bombed? Apartment buildings crumble in moments. Cars are wiped out. People, too. Office buildings become blazing hulks. Churches and monuments that have stood for centuries are reduced to rubble in a flash. The story of your country disappears with them.
Backup Ukraine empowers anyone to become an archivist. With just a smartphone, individuals can scan buildings and monuments as full 3D models and store them in an open, secure online archive—a place where no bombs can reach. To help preserve Ukraine’s most important cultural sites, Polycam has partnered with Skeiron, a team of passionate 3D scanning professionals in Ukraine using laser, photogrammetry, and point cloud software for large-scale scans.
Skeiron, bootstrapped but fearless and fiercely determined, focuses on capturing Ukraine’s central masterpieces of architectural and artistic heritage. One example is the Church of Saints Andrew and Jehoshaphat, completed in 1630 in central Lviv. Known for its stunning Baroque interior adorned with carved arches and frescoes, the church has been meticulously scanned inside and out, documenting its richly decorated black-and-gold features. The capture of public works is limited to a volunteer corps with written permission from Ukrainian authorities. Volunteers must be physically located in Ukraine, and it is not recommended for other civilians to scan public sites.
Every detail counts, from famous statues to local gathering places. Items with rich textures, like statues, murals, and artwork, scan particularly well, while shiny or transparent surfaces pose more challenges for the reconstruction algorithm. Drones can even scan large buildings, and indoor locations like shelters can be captured, providing historical records of life during the war. Polycam’s 3D captures are accurate down to about one inch, processed securely on the device itself without an internet connection, and automatically saved to the Backup Ukraine database if tagged with Ukrainian coordinates.
All items marked “savable” are shared under the Creative Commons 4.0 license and made available to UNESCO and Blue Shield’s museum partners by default. Creators have the option to disable the “savable” feature, retaining full rights if they wish, although this prevents long-term preservation. Polycam pledges to provide free capture, storage, and access to anyone in Ukraine for the duration of the Russia-Ukraine war, maintaining the archive for a minimum of five years post-conflict. This savable data will be freely accessible to partner organizations and the public directly from the Polycam Ukraine page.
