Evidence suggests Russians are stealing art from Ukraine on a World War II scale

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 Russian-occupied Crimea. 

The director of the Central Museum of Taurida in Simferopol, Andriy Malgin, acknowledged to Radio Free Europe that much of Kherson art museum’s collection was now in Simferopol.

He said the artworks were in storage to protect them. “These are not our paintings. We understand this very well. There are no attempts on our part to declare that they will remain with us or we will exhibit them. We just store them,” Malgin said.

Now Dotsenko and others on the museum’s staff are working to calculate exactly what was taken away, even as Kherson continues to come under Russian shelling. 

One rare book in the museum’s collection, by one of Ukraine’s most celebrated poets, was rescued before the building was looted.

As Russian occupying authorities were purging most of the museum’s staff, 66-year-old Galina Aksyutina, who oversaw the library, took a last look at the collection. She spotted an 1894 edition of “Kobzar,” by Taras Shevchenko, whose writings in the 19th century were censored by the Russian empire and are now seen as the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature.

“I felt very sorry for this book. I thought this would be the first thing they destroy because of its symbolic meaning, as they destroy everything Ukrainian,” she said.

She decided to hide the book under her clothes.

“When I was leaving the museum, I was nervous. The Russians looked through all my personal belongings, but they didn’t search me personally, so they didn’t notice the book I took out.”

The book, she said, is now safely back at the museum.  

Yasmine Salam

Yasmine Salam is an associate producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit. Previously she worked in the London Bureau, covering international stories.

Artem Grudinin contributed.