KHERSON, Ukraine — One day in October, Russian forces blocked a street in the center of Kherson and surrounded an elegant old building with dozens of soldiers.
Five large trucks parked. So did a line of military vehicles, carrying Russian agents who entered through various doors. It was a military-style assault against an art museum.
Over the next four days, the Kherson Regional Art Museum was cleaned out, witnesses said, with Russian elements “busy like insects,” porters hauling out thousands of paintings, soldiers hastily wrapping them in sheets, art experts shouting orders and packing supplies. scattered everywhere.
When Alina Dotsenko, director of the museum, returned from exile in early November and realized how much had been stolen, she said: “I almost went crazy.”
As Russia has battered Ukraine with deadly missile attacks and brutal atrocities against civilians, it has also looted from the country’s cultural institutions some of the most important and intensely protected contributions of Ukraine and its ancestors stretching back thousands of years.
International art experts say the looting may be the biggest collective art theft since the Nazis looted Europe in World War II.
In Kherson, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators say the Russians stole more than 15,000 unique pieces of art and artifacts. They removed bronze statues from parks, checked out books from a riverside science library and packed up the crumbling bones of Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s 200-year-old lover.
Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have looted or damaged more than 30 museums, including several in Kherson, which was retaken in November, and others in Mariupol and Melitopol, which remain under Russian control.
Ukrainian officials and international experts believe the robberies are a widespread attack on Ukraine’s pride, culture and identity, consistent with the imperial attitude of Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin, who has consistently belittled the idea of Ukraine as a separate nation and used that as a central reason for its invasion.
In each case of looting, witnesses reported an operation led by experts.
“Surprised is not the word; I am furious,” Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture, said in a television interview as he toured the looted art museum in Kherson, visibly upset. “If they stole our heritage, they believe that we would not continue living and creating. But we will.”
Even with the war raging, Ukrainian lawyers and art experts are compiling meticulous lists of lost objects, sifting through museum journals and trying to identify potential witnesses and collaborators.
The Ukrainians are also working with international organizations, such as The Art Loss Register, to track down the pieces.
“Everyone in the art market is on red alert looking for this material,” said James Ratcliffe, general counsel for The Art Loss Register, a London-based organization.
His organization, he said, had searched more than 2,000 items from Ukraine that were believed to have been stolen and others at risk.
The Ukrainians accuse the Russians of violating international treaties that prohibit the looting of works of art, such as the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Created after World War II, both Ukraine and Russia signed it.
The Russians have portrayed their actions as a liberation.
“Don’t panic,” Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-appointed deputy administrator of Kherson, said in October when he explained what had happened to the statues that disappeared from Kherson. He said that when the fighting ceased, the monuments would “definitely return” and that “everything was being done for the benefit of preserving the historical heritage of the City of Kherson.”
(A few weeks later, just as Ukrainian troops were liberating Kherson, Stremousov was killed in a suspicious car accident.)
Many of the paintings looted from the Kherson art museum, including beloved classics like miniaturist Ivan Pokhytonov’s “Piquet by the Riverside, Sunset” and Heorhii Kurnakov’s “Autumn Time,” recently appeared in a museum in Crimea. , the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Andrei Malguin, the museum’s director, told the Spanish newspaper El País that his museum kept the collection for its own “protection.” In October, as Russia’s control of Kherson was rapidly crumbling, Russian agents scrambled to get everything out of the museum as quickly as possible.
“The removal was carried out with the participation of museum specialists, but with serious violations of the transportation and packaging of the works,” said Vitalii Tytych, a Ukrainian lawyer who is part of a special military unit that documents war crimes against the Ukrainian cultural heritage. “Paintings were hurriedly removed from their frames, frames were broken, and cultural objects were also damaged or destroyed.
“Many works will be lost,” he lamented.
The Museum of Local Lore in Kherson has one smashed display case after another. Deep gouges in the floor were made by soldiers dragging centuries-old artifacts. Sometimes they were not successful. Denys Sykoza, a Kherson official, stood over the remains of a delicate 5th century glass goblet, looking at the shards.
“They broke this trying to steal it,” he said quietly. “And there was only one like it.”
By: JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and OLEKSANDRA MYKOLYSHYN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/world/asia/ukraine-art-russia-steal.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-19 23:00:06
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