KHERSON, Ukraine—One morning in late Octoberthe russian forces They blocked a street in the center of Kherson and surrounded an elegant old building with dozens of soldiers.
they arrived five trucks large, followed by a row of military vehicles carrying agents russians They entered the building through several doors. Was a military style assault carefully planned and highly organized… to a art Museum.
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During the next four days, the Kherson Regional Art Museum He was robbed, witnesses said. Russian forces “swarmed like insects”, porters hauled out on carts thousands of paintings as soldiers hastily wrapped them in sheets, art experts shouted orders, and packing materials flew everywhere.
“They handled masterpieces, the kind that no longer exist in the world, as if they were garbage,” said veteran museum director Alina Dotsenko, who recently returned from exile, recounting what she had been told by employees and witnesses.
When Dotsenko He returned to the museum in early November and understood how much had been stolen, “I almost lost my mind,” he said.
At the same time that Russia has been destroying Ukraine With deadly missile attacks and brutal atrocities against civilians, it has also been looting from the nation’s cultural institutions some of the most important and intensely protected contributions of Ukraine and its ancestors dating back thousands of years.
International art experts say the looting could be the biggest collective art theft since the Nazis looted Europe in the WWII.
One of the few remaining sculptures at the Kherson Regional Art Museum, which curators said Russian forces spent several days looting in 2021, in Kherson, Ukraine, on Nov. 22, 2022. (Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times)
In KhersonIn southern Ukraine, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators claim that the Russians stole more than 15 thousand pieces of art and unique artifacts. They hauled bronze statues from parks, hauled books from a riverside scientific library, packed the fragile 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkinthe lover of Catherine the Great, and even took a zoo raccoonleaving behind a trail of empty cages, bare pedestals and broken glass.
Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have looted or damaged more than 30 museums, including several in the city of Khersonwhich was resumed in November, and others in Mariupol and Melitopol, which are still under Russian occupation. Ukrainian investigators are still calculating the losses of the missing oil paintings, ancient stelae, bronze vessels, coins, necklaces and busts, and the number of reported stolen items will most likely increase.
The looting is by no means a case of random or opportunistic misbehavior by a handful of rude soldiers or even a desire to make a quick profit on the black market, Ukrainian officials and international experts say. Instead, they believe the robberies are part of a general attack on Ukrainian pride, culture and identity, consistent with the imperial attitude of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who has consistently belittled the idea of Ukraine as an independent nation and used that as a central rationale for his invasion.
“This is not about a soldier who took a silver goblet and put it in his backpack,” said James Ratcliffe, general counsel for The Art Loss Registeran organization based in London that tracks stolen art. “The scale of this is so much bigger.”
in a museum of Melitopola southern Ukrainian town that the Russians seized in the early days of the war, some witnesses claimed that a mysterious man in a white lab coat had come to carefully extract, with gloves and tweezers, the most valuable items in the collection , which included gold pieces from the Scythian Empire made 2 thousand 300 years. As the man removed the priceless antiquities, a squad of Russian soldiers stood at attention behind him, in case anyone tried to stop him.
A vandalized exhibit that once held a Nazi soldier’s medal and ID, along with Adolf Hitler’s signature, all looted by Russian forces, according to staff at the Kherson Regional Museum of History, in Kherson, Ukraine, on 20 November 2022.
The Ukrainians have many battles on their hands. Cities in the east like Bakhmut are being hit. Drone swarms continue to destroy critical infrastructure, plunging thousands into darkness. Large tracts of territory in the south and east remain occupied and 1 in 3 Ukrainians he has been forced to flee his home.
But even with the war raging, a group of Ukrainian lawyerss and art experts work around the clock collecting evidence for what they hope will be future trials for cultural crimes. From dark offices in frigid buildings with no electricity or heat, wearing gloves and wool hats indoors, they make meticulous lists of lost items, go through museum records and try to identify possible witnesses and local collaborators who could have helped the Russians in the robberies.
Ukrainians are also working together with international art organizations such as The Art Loss Register, to track looted pieces.
“Everyone in the art market is on red alert to look for this material,” Ratcliffe said. “Every auction house that sees material from the Ukraine will start asking a lot of questions.”
His organization, he said, has already registered more than 2 thousand articles from Ukraine believed to have been stolen and others at risk, including paintings from the Kherson art museum and Scythian gold from Melitopol.
The Ukrainians accuse the Russians of violating international treaties that prohibit the looting of works of art, such as the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Assets in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954. Created in the aftermath of World War II, the treaty calls on signatories to “prohibit, prevent and, if necessary, put an end to any form of theft” of cultural property. Both Ukraine and Russia signed it.
A riverside scientific library from which the director said Russian forces stole important first-edition books, in Kherson, Ukraine, on December 2, 2022.
But the Russians have turned the tables narrative and they have presented their actions not as robbery, but as liberation.
“Don’t panic,” said Kirill Stremousov, Kherson’s deputy administrator assigned by Russia, when he explained in October what had happened to the statues that disappeared from Kherson. Stremousov assured that when the fighting ceases, the monuments “will definitely come back” and that “everything is being done for the benefit of preserving the historical heritage of the city of Kherson.”
The statues have not yet been returned. (And a few weeks later, just as Ukrainian troops were liberating Kherson, Stremousov died in a suspicious car accident).
Many of the paintings looted from the Kherson art museum, including endearing classics as “Piquet on the Bank of the River. Sunset” (“Piquet on the river bank. Sunset”) by miniaturist Ivan Pokhytonov and “Autumn Time” by Heorhii Kurnakov recently appeared in a museum in crimeathe Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Museum director Andrei Malguin offered similar reasoning. “We have 10,000 pieces and we are inventorying them,” he told the Spanish newspaper El País. He claimed that his museum kept the collection for its own “protection.”
(Russian soldiers similarly displayed the four-legged loot they had “liberated” from the kherson zoo. In several videos that went viral, a group of paratroopers stated that the raccoon Stolen was now their pet, he traveled with them on the front and had been baptized as “Jersón”. That spawned a popular meme on the Ukrainian internet: saving the raccoon soldier).
Tour the museums Kherson it is currently depressing. Virtually all of the thousands of oil paintings that had been stored in the basement of the art museum—as well as the computer records that documented them—are gone.
“I am the daughter of an officer who raised me to be strong, but this made me cry for two weeks,” said Dotsenko, who has worked up in it museum of art during 45 years.
“No,” she corrected herself, “I didn’t just cry. I screamed. I bit the walls.”
Across the street, in the Museum of Local Traditions Kherson, you can see one smashed display case after another. The ground has deep marks left by soldiers dragging away centuries-old artifacts. Sometimes they were unsuccessful. Denys Sykoza, inspector of cultural objects for the government of KhersonHe stopped in front of the remains of a delicate fifth-century glass goblet, staring at the shards.
“They broke it when they tried to steal it,” he said quietly. “And she was the one of her kind.”
