How Russian invasion has put Ukraine’s cultural heritage at risk
Weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, a sophisticated heist unfolded in the basement of a museum in the southeastern city of Melitopol.
A man cloaked in a lab coat, flanked by Russian soldiers, reportedly opened cardboard boxes and delicately removed some of the finest examples of goldsmithing antiquity dating back 2,300 years.
Chief among them was a gold Scythian helmet, originating from the 4th century BC and believed to be worth millions of dollars.
“The orcs have taken hold of our Scythian gold,” said Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol at the time who used a pejorative term to describe Russian troops. “We don’t know about its fate… and I hope that we will be able to get it back.”
The helmet is among the highest value items recorded as stolen from a Ukrainian museum on the Art Loss Register (ALR) — the world’s largest private database of lost, looted and stolen art and antiquities.
Since the conflict escalated, the ALR and the Cultural Heritage At Risk Database (Chard) has registered more than 6,000 items from over 30 Ukrainian museums.
Olivia Whitting, manager and cultural heritage lead at the ALR, said: “Cultural heritage is often one of the first victims of conflict or war. Artworks and antiquities that have been lost, stolen or sometimes completely destroyed leaves a country having to rebuild its identity again.
“We are not expecting these items to appear on the legitimate market straight away — it could be 10 to 15 years. A lot of the destruction and theft has happened but the registrations of these items by the ALR and the Chard will serve as a safeguard so they can be recovered in the future”.
About 15 per cent of the items of cultural heritage registered on behalf of Ukraine are known to be stolen or missing.
Whitting said that once an item is logged it remains on the database until it is recovered or the claim against it has been resolved. “We can provide practical guidance on recovery based on the extensive experience of the hundreds of cases which we have worked on,” she added.”
The ALR conducts more than 400,000 checks on items on the market each year for clients that include auction houses, museums, banks and law enforcement.
Among the notable stolen artworks added to the ALR’s database is the Anglo-Dutch master Sir Peter Lely’s Lady with a Dog, which was stolen from Kherson Regional Art Museum in southern Ukraine. It was among 14,000 artworks and objects looted by Russian troops in autumn 2022.
Lady with a Dog by Sir Peter Lely
Much of the art, originally from England, Spain, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, was hidden in underground vaults until Russian agents pulled up in five large trucks and waged a “highly organised, military-style assault”. Over four days the museum was emptied.
“They were loading such masterpieces, which there are no more in the world, as if they were garbage,” Alina Dotsenko, the museum’s director, told the New York Times.
The exact value of Lely’s painting has not been confirmed but one of his works sold at Christie’s for $716,300 (£530,000) last year.
Other classics on the database are Piquet on the Bank of the River. Sunset by the Russian miniaturist Ivan Pokhitonov, and Moonlit Night by Ivan Aivazovsky, the Russian Romantic painter acclaimed for being a master of marine art.
Piquet on the Bank of the River. Sunset by Ivan Pokhytonov
PHIL ANDERSON
Aivazovsky’s $1.09 million (£806,385) canvas was thought to be among at least 52 works illegally transferred to the Simferopol Art Museum in 2014 at the start of the Russian occupation of Crimea. But some art experts believe it was stolen from a museum in Mariupol three years later.
The painting emerged at the Moscow Auction House in Russia in February 2024 and was billed as the “star lot”. It was sold a few days later for ₽92 million ($995,000).
Lydia Zaininger, the executive director of the Ukrainian Institute of America, said: “This artwork has been publicly documented as stolen from a museum in Ukraine, which is where it should be returned.
“Putting it up for public auction is an affront to international rules of order, a flagrant violation of Unesco’s laws protecting stolen art, and further clear evidence of Russia’s genocidal campaign to destroy Ukraine’s cultural heritage,” she told Artnet News.
Russia has carried out a rampant plunder of Ukrainian art and antiquities since February 2022.
It razed the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, about 50 miles northwest of the capital Kyiv, which was home to dozens of works by Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko.
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