Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials seized three ancient swords dating to the fifth or sixth century, as well as an ancient stone ax head, at New York’s JFK Airport, all stolen from Ukraine. They were returned to the government in a ceremony last month at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington.
When Ukrainian art and artifacts have been looted, Russian troops are often helped by Russian experts who travel to seized territory and know the country’s art collections, say experts in and outside Ukraine.
“There are expert groups who were specially commissioned to come to Ukraine,” said Ihor Poshyvailo, a Ukrainian curator who was trained by the Smithsonian team before the invasion.
“They were hunting for historic objects,” said Poshyvailo, a co-founder of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, which tries to help repair and preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage collections.
Inside job
Sometimes Ukrainians collaborating with occupying Russian forces have enabled the plunder.
After Russian forces captured Kherson in March last year, Alina Dotsenko and her colleagues fabricated an elaborate lie to try to protect the paintings and sculptures in the city’s art museum. They told the Russians that the museum was under renovation and that the art collection had been removed.
For several months, Dotsenko said, the ruse worked. But several Ukrainians in league with the occupying forces gave away their secret, and the Russians eventually learned that the art was still in the building, hidden in a storage area.
Before Kherson fell, Dotsenko had made backup copies of the electronic inventory for the museum’s collection and removed any record of it from the building. But a former colleague, she later learned, had also made a copy of the archive and gave it to the Russians.
Soon after the convoy of Russian trucks left the museum loaded with thousands of artworks in November, photos appeared indicating the trucks had arrived at a museum in…
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