This article was first published in The Art Newspaper. It was written by Sophia Kishkovsky and published on 29 September 2022.
Dozens of Ukrainian museums are set to be appropriated by Russia tomorrow as President Vladimir Putin plans to sign a decree annexing four occupied regions, the Kremlin has announced.
Earlier this week referendums on accession to the Russian Federation were held in the territories Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—which cumulatively compare in size to the land mass of Portugal and are home to millions of Ukrainian citizens—that resulted overwhelmingly in favour of Russian leadership. The results have widely been dismissed by the international community as fake.
Thousands of artefacts and heritage pieces that are collectively owned by the Ukrainian government and its subsidiaries will be lost to the occupying nation.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine can be seen as a microcosm for what could now take place after the collections are appropriated. The annexation of Crimea led to an ongoing international court case over Scythian gold loaned from Ukraine to Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum. Russia is demanding that the pieces from Crimean museums be returned to the Black Sea peninsula.
Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Policy, Oleksandr Tkachenko, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne in August that it was not possible to evacuate museums quickly from Russian occupation. “What is needed is not the opposition of museum directors, as we have often seen in those regions where hostilities have already taken place, but cooperation with local authorities,” he said. “We don’t have the budget to evacuate anyone.”
