ON AN UNSEASONABLY warm day in October, the silence outside broken by birdsong and artillery fire, Olga Goncharova sat in her office on the ground floor of the Kherson Regional Museum, a bulletproof vest wrapped around the back of her chair, the windows covered with plywood, and cursed the Russians. “They’re vandals, the people who did this,” she said.

Ms Goncharova escaped from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, shortly after Russian troops poured into the city. By the time she returned, in November that year, Kherson had been liberated. The Russians had evacuated to the other bank of the Dnieper river, from which they have been bombing the city ever since. Ms Goncharova wept when she entered the museum where had worked for over two decades. “There was broken glass everywhere,” she says. “They had torn some of the exhibits out from their pedestals.”

In fact Russian officials, assisted by local collaborators and the museum’s then director, had removed more than 28,000 artefacts, loaded them onto lorries and shipped them to Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Gone were the ancient coins, the armour, the Greek sculptures, the Scythian jewellery, a precious Bukhara sabre—and even the hard drives containing the museum’s catalogue. Three decades ago, Ms Goncharova says, the museum recovered a collection of Gothic bronzes looted by German occupiers during the second world war. Now the Russians have stolen them.

The museum in Kherson is one of many in Ukraine that have been plundered. The country’s ministry of culture estimates that over 480,000 artworks have fallen into Russian hands since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. At least 38 museums, home to nearly 1.5m works, have been damaged or destroyed.

Ukrainian officials have also dispatched a number of collections elsewhere in Europe, to protect them from Russian bombs. These include dozens of Ukrainian paintings from the early 20th century, currently at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. The collection will be on display in Vienna from February 23rd to June 2nd and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from June 29th to October 13th. When the evacuated treasures will return to Ukraine is unclear.

Artists have not been spared either. Ms Goncharova points to a painting of dried flowers and pottery that hangs opposite her desk. The artist, Vyacheslav Mashnytskyi, from Kherson, went missing after Russian troops turned up at his riverside dacha and requisitioned his boat. Friends who stopped by the house days later found traces of blood. Mr Mashnytskyi has not been heard from since.

The price of plunder

Putting a price on the stolen works is nearly impossible, since only a fraction had been appraised for insurance purposes. Last April the UN estimated that the war had caused $2.6bn-worth of damage to Ukraine’s cultural heritage. That now looks to be a conservative figure. Tracking exactly what the Russians have looted, and from where, is also a headache. Many Ukrainian museums, especially smaller regional ones, had relied on paper catalogues, often outdated or incomplete, says Mariana Tomyn, an official at the culture ministry. Some of those catalogues are now gone. Efforts to digitise inventories, which began only three years ago, have taken on a new urgency.

Ukraine will seek redress. Prosecutors in Kyiv are investigating Russian officials and Ukrainians involved in the plunder. Mrs Tomyn is working on a new restitution law and the overhaul of an outdated one on the protection of cultural heritage. And since late October a special army unit has begun to monitor and assess damage to cultural sites. But there is little hope of recovering what the occupiers have stolen. Russian officials have already prepared plans to ship Ukrainian collections stored in Crimea to Russia in case Ukraine should retake the peninsula, says Vyacheslav Baranov, an archaeologist at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences.

There have been some breakthroughs. On November 26th, after a long court battle, hundreds of historical treasures from Crimea were returned to Ukraine from the Netherlands. The collection, which includes Scythian gold carvings from the fourth century BC, had been on display at Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum in 2014. Russia demanded the objects be returned to the Crimean museums from which they had been loaned. The Dutch supreme court ruled in 2021 that they belonged in Ukraine.

They are not the only ones to make their way back. At the Lavra museum complex in Kyiv, Maksym Ostapenko slowly unwraps a bundle of white packing paper. Out of it emerges a Bronze Age battleaxe. Another bundle yields a sixth-century Khazar sword; another, a Cuman sabre. In the summer of 2022, the weapons, plus a few other objects probably destined for America’s antiquities market, surfaced in a mailroom at John F. Kennedy airport. The American authorities sent them back to Ukraine a year later. Most were probably excavated illegally in southern Ukraine, near Crimea, says Mr Ostapenko, the museum’s director, or discovered by Russian troops digging trenches. Such archaeological looting has thrived in the occupied territories, he says. “The damage done to cultural heritage is immeasurable.”

Across the street from Kherson’s regional museum sits the city’s art museum, its mustard-yellow façade pocked by shrapnel from a Russian Grad rocket. It had been under renovation when the Russians invaded; some of the staff told the new authorities that its entire collection had been transported north. It was actually being stored in the basement. Eventually the Russians found out, thanks to local informers, including the ex-director of the regional museum. By the time the Ukrainians recaptured the city, the Russians had made off with about 10,000 of the museum’s 14,000 works, including paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky, Ilya Repin and Oleksii Shovkunenko, the artist after whom the museum is named, and religious icons. They left behind some sculptures which were too heavy to move, says Ihor Rusol, an employee, plus a few portraits of Lenin.

Last summer museum officials concluded, from photos and videos online, that some of the stolen paintings were being stored at the Tavrida museum in Simferopol, in occupied Crimea. Reached over the phone, the Tavrida’s director, Andrei Malgin, acknowledges that the entirety of the Kherson collection is held in his museum. Mr Malgin, who was sanctioned by the European Union in June for his role in the plunder, says the works were moved to the Tavrida “for safekeeping”.

Inside the empty basement of Kherson’s art museum, Mr Rusol says he expects no gestures of goodwill from the Russians. “There is only one thing,” he says, Ukraine can do to ensure that the city’s stolen art returns home. “Win the war.” ■