“This is an international crime committed by the enemy,” Alina Dotsenko, director of Ukraine’s Kherson County museum, told BFMTV on Monday. Occupied by the Russians since the start of the conflict, the city of Kherson was liberated in mid-November after eight months of looting and degradation.
However, in the museum in question, the works were hidden in the basement. But, after the departure of the Russians, Hanna Srypka, the museum guard, could only notice the losses.
“If we talk about quantity, before the war we had 14,000 works of art. Now there are less than 300 left ”, he lamented.
According to the Minister of Culture of Ukraine, on BFMTV last Thursday, “more than 80% of the collections of the two museums” in the city were stolen.
For their part, the Russians do not deny the theft of these works, but simply claim to have protected them from the violence of the fighting.
Trucks seen in Crimea
Hanna Srypka claimed to have seen Kremlin soldiers, on amateur videos, loading paintings and statues onto trucks.
“They were raffling, they took the most precious things. It was obvious that they knew it, ”he declared to our antenna.
For the director of the museum, these pieces have not disappeared: “I saw our works in the local history museum in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea (still occupied by Russia, editor’s note). I have seen them unloaded with the same trucks that came here to loot, that is precisely an international crime committed by the enemy”.
From now on, the museum keeper lists all these priceless losses. A titanic but essential job to one day be able to file a complaint before an international court.
This looting adds to the 236 cultural sites damaged in ten months, according to UNESCO, the UN agency in charge of culture. Ukraine delivers a balance more than four times larger.
“More than 1,000 cultural sites have been damaged” in Ukraine since the start of the war, Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said on BFMTV on Thursday.
Source: BFM TV
