After the departure of the Russians from the Ukrainian city of Kherson, the heads of the county museum noted the disappearance of almost all of the collections.
“It is an international crime committed by the enemy,” said Monday on BFMTV Alina Dotsenko, director of the Kherson county museum in Ukraine. Occupied by the Russians since the start of the conflict, the city of Kherson was liberated in mid-November after eight months of looting and degradation.
In the museum in question, the works had however been hidden in the basement. But, after the departure of the Russians, Hanna Scrypka, the guard of the museum, could only note the losses.
“If we talk about quantity, before the war, we had 14,000 works of art. Now, there are less than 300 left,” she lamented.
According to the Ukrainian Minister of Culture, on BFMTV last Thursday, “more than 80% of the collections of the two museums” of the city were stolen.
For their part, the Russians do not deny the theft of these works, but simply claim to have protected them from the violence of the fighting.
Trucks seen in Crimea
Hanna Scrypka claimed to have seen the Kremlin soldiers, in amateur videos, loading the paintings and statues into trucks.
“They were sorting, they took the most precious things. It was obvious that they knew about it”, she declared on our antenna.
For the director of the museum, these pieces have not disappeared: “I saw our works in the museum of local history in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea (still occupied by Russia, editor’s note). I have them seen unloading them with the same trucks that came here to loot. This is precisely an international crime committed by the enemy.”
From now on, the guardian of the museum lists all these priceless losses. A titanic work but essential for one day to be able to file a complaint before an international tribunal.
These lootings are in addition to the 236 cultural sites damaged in ten months, according to UNESCO, the UN agency in charge of culture. Ukraine delivers a balance sheet more than four times higher.
“More than 1,000 cultural sites have been damaged” in Ukraine since the start of the war, Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said Thursday on BFMTV.
