Ukraine searches for looted art after Russian invasion

As a result of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2022, the Russian army was forced to withdraw from the area around Kherson. On November 11, the city was liberated by the Ukrainian army.

One of the many consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the months of turmoil in the Kherson region was the devastation of the cultural sector.

For example, in early November 2022, entire collections were removed from the Kherson Art Museum, the Kherson Regional Museum, and the National Archives of the Kherson Region. Tombstones of Russian tsarist commanders and even the remains of Russian Field Marshal Grigory Potemkin, a confidant of Tsarina Catherine II (Empress Catherine the Great), were looted.

The extent of the withdrawal

If we compare the museum’s exhibition lists with what remains, almost 11,000 works of art are missing from the Kherson Art Museum. This represents more than three quarters of the collection.

Museum director Alina Dotsenko mourns the loss of all these works, including three seascapes by Romantic painter of Armenian descent Ivan Aivasovsky, “Portrait of a Lady with a Dog” by 17th-century English painter Peter Lely and different paintings from the Soviet era, which Dotsenko herself collected for the museum in the 1970s.

Russian occupation forces took the stolen works to the Tavrida Central Museum, located in Simferopol, on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. The peninsula has been annexed by Russia since 2014.

“Concerned people sent us videos from there showing our paintings being unloaded. We recognize them,” said museum director Alina Dotsenko. Since then, her team has been combining photos from social media and images from Russian television.

So far, however, they have only been able to locate 94 works of art using inventory numbers and image fragments. They don’t know where the others are or what condition they are in.

The most precious and valuable

The director of the Kherson Regional Museum, Olga Goncharova, regrets the loss of the most valuable items in the collection. The Russians took ancient Greek amphorae, gold ornaments from steppe nomads, medieval weapons and Orthodox icons to the left bank of the Dnipro River, an area still occupied by Russia.

Goncharova says that since the withdrawal of the occupying forces, the museum also lacks important lists of exhibits and documents that prove its historical value. She can therefore only roughly estimate the number of objects looted at around 23 thousand.

Some of the exhibits ended up in the Russian-occupied city of Henichesk in southern Ukraine. Museum employees who collaborated with the Russian occupiers also retreated there. Some of the exhibits were taken to the Chersonese Taurian museum in Sevastopol.

There is even less information about the fate of museum collections in Ukrainian territories still occupied by Russia. According to museum officials and Russian media reports, administrations appointed by the occupation forces “evacuated” museum and gallery collections from the city of New Kakhovka in November 2022. It is not known where. The only thing that is clear is that at least one Paleolithic collection is located in Sevastopol.

In Russian-occupied Mariupol in the Donetsk region, all museums were destroyed during the siege. As Russian media reported in April 2022, the director of the local history museum, Natalia Kapustnikova, only managed to save a dozen works of art. These included three paintings by Mariupol-born painter Arkhip Kuindzhi, known for his landscape paintings. She also managed to rescue a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky. However, Kapustnikova handed the paintings over to the Russians, who took them to the local museum in Russian-occupied Donetsk.

Investigations by Ukrainian authorities

Since the start of Russia’s extensive invasion, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been investigating the removal of museum collections. He is suspected of “violations of the laws and customs of war” as part of a “suspected genocide of the Ukrainian people”.

SBU investigator Yevhen Rusinov claims that there is a “network” for stealing museum pieces, about which not everything is known yet. “But we know that both high-ranking representatives of the Russian state and the military are involved.”

During the Russian invasion, more than 40 museums in the occupied territories were looted, says Ukraine’s First Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Khomenko. The loss has not yet been fully quantified. “It could take years,” he says.

By the end of the year, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine intends to create a register in which all available information about collections located in the occupied territories will be entered. Later on, this should help you find art and valuables. However, this will probably only be possible after the end of the war.

This article was originally written in Ukrainian.