A French organisation has lodged a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the plundering of Ukrainian museums by Russia, which it claims is 'the biggest looting of cultural heritage in Europe during an international armed conflict since the Second World War'.
The looting of Ukrainian cultural property by Russia is "systematic, widespread and organised," the association Pour l'Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre ("For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours") said in its complaint to the ICC.
It is calling for arrest warrants to be issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin and eight high-ranking Russian officials, alleging that this mass plundering is "planned at the highest level of the Russian state" and has been enabled "by a well-oiled Russian organisation".
According to Sylvie Rollet, president of the association and professor emeritus at the University of Poitiers: "Everything was in place at the time of the large-scale invasion [in February 2022]."
Ukrainian officials have also claimed that Russian forces looted the "largest and most valuable" collections of Scythian artefacts in Ukraine, in Melitopol.
Cultural establishments in the city of Mariupol, where a siege took place at the start of the war, have also been emptied of their works of art.
At the Kherson art museum, which had one of the richest collections in Ukraine, more than 10,000 works were stolen by the Russians during their occupation of the city.
According to the Ukrainian Minister of Culture, Mykola Tochytskyi, Russia has stolen more than 1.7 million works of art and cultural properties from the occupied territories of Ukraine since the start of the war.
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A legislative arsenal
Russia has created a legal framework allowing it to carry out these thefts. The federal law of 18 March, 2023 allowed it to incorporate "the collections of 77 Ukrainian museums into the country's catalogue of museums".
In December 2023, another new law extended the concept of a "museum collection" and stipulated that "any collection, until it is included in the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, will be recognised as a valuable asset and thus placed under the protection of the Russian State" – "thus enshrining the systematic appropriation of the aforementioned assets by the Russian Federation," notes the complaint.
Such acts of looting are considered war crimes under international conventions.
According to the Pour l'Ukraine association, Putin bears "full and primary responsibility for the adoption of legislation aimed at facilitating Russia's appropriation of Ukraine's cultural heritage".
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Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova is also accused of having actively participated in "drafting the federal law governing the registration of museum collections from the annexed Ukrainian territories".
Olga Lyubimova, the Russian Minister of Culture, is also suspected of being "directly involved in implementing the policy of despoiling the cultural heritage of the annexed Ukrainian territories," as is her deputy Sergei Obryvalin.
"All of these individuals were kept informed of the planning, organisation and implementation of the joint plan to despoil Ukraine's cultural heritage," the complaint states.
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'A new line in Russian history'
As for the fate of the looted art and artefacts, Rollet says: "Most of the works were sent to Russia. The aim is to show that this land has always been Russian, that Ukrainian artists are Russian, that the people are Russian, and so on."
She added: "The historical societies, the directors of the major museums and the Inter-musées working group were also mobilised for the looting of museums in the occupied zones and for the transfer of these works either to annexed Crimea or to Russia, in order to 'Russify' them."
"It's about appropriating Ukrainian cultural heritage to turn it into a new line in Russian history, in the great Russia. This is a war crime," Emmanuel Daoud, the association's lawyer, told FranceInfo.
This operation was made all the more feasible because "Crimea served as a laboratory," Rollet believes. According to data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, by July 2024 there were fewer than 1.2 million museum pieces left in Crimea, compared with 12 million before the Russian annexation.
Thirty-eight paintings from the collection of the I.K. Aïvazovsky National Art Gallery, located in Feodossia, Crimea were transferred to Russia to be shown at an exhibition organised at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow in 2016.
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Similarly, several works from museums in the Luhansk region were exhibited as part of the major Novorossiya exhibition held at the Russian Historical Museum in Moscow in autumn 2023 – and have never been returned to Ukraine.
Sergei Naryshkin, who holds the dual roles of director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service and head of the Russian Historical Society, has organised exhibitions "justifying the annexation of Ukrainian territories by Russia and conveying a falsified narrative about the 'inextricable historical link' between the Donbas and Russia," according to Rollet. "It's really a project to rewrite history."
This article has been adapted from the original version in French.
