Investigation: Uncovering the secret Russian FSB operation to loot Ukraine's museums

As Ukraine's liberating forces advanced in the fall of 2022, several trucks stopped near the rear yard of the Kherson Local History Museum. Inside the building itself, dozens of people moved back and forth like ants through the corridors.

These people didn't work there — they were employees from museums in occupied Crimea who, on the instructions of the Russian leadership, had come to remove Scythian and Sarmatian gold jewellery, valuable collections of weapons and coins, and thousands of other historical artifacts from then-occupied Kherson.

"Some of them did the packing, others grabbed what they liked,"  a museum guard recalled in an interview with the Kyiv independent.

They then shifted their focus to the nearby Kherson Museum of Local Lore. What was unfolding was just part of what would amount to the looting of nearly 33,000 items from the two museums — the largest such theft in Europe since World War II.

A two-year investigation by Ukrainian authorities has made little progress. The media has only mentioned the names of Ukrainian defectors who collaborated with Russia.

The Kyiv Independent has discovered not only who organized the illegal removal of valuables, but also where the collections are now held.

To dupe those responsible into revealing previously secret details of the theft, investigative journalist Yevheniia Motorevska would have to take on the roles of a naive producer of a Russian TV channel, and a tough and inquisitive investigator of the Russian Federation.

'It was a real act of vandalism'

Both museums are located in the central part of Kherson near the Dnipro River, an area which before Russia's full-scale invasion, was always crowded with people visiting the exhibitions and frequenting the local restaurants.

The city of Kherson was occupied by Russian forces in the early days of March, 2022, until being liberated by Ukraine's lightning counteroffensive later that year.

Today this area is a red zone which suffers constant shelling — just a couple of kilometers away, on the other bank of the Dnipro river, Russian forces fire artillery, and launch drones that systematically target civilians in what has been dubbed a "human safari."

Since the end of the 19th century, the Kherson Local History Museum had accumulated more than 180,000 artifacts including those of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, Greeks and Romans, all of whom lived in the territory of modern southern Ukraine over the centuries.

Today all that remains are the paper descriptions where they used to be displayed.

The current head of the Kherson Local History museum, Olha Honcharova, told the Kyiv Independent about the moment she first entered the museum after the city’s liberation.

"It was a real act of vandalism. In Russia, they always spoke of themselves as a cultural nation. But no, only vandals could have done that," she said.

"A very expensive item that was in this hall was the saber of the Emir of Bukhara. It cost, according to some estimates, more than $150,000," she added while walking around the empty halls.

Honcharova was appointed to her position immediately after Kherson was liberated from Russian occupation. Her predecessor, Tetiana Bratchenko, collaborated with the occupation regime and is now, according to the Kyiv Independent's investigation, hiding in Russia.

In total, more than 23,000 exhibits were stolen from the Kherson Museum of Local Lore, as well as all the records of the collection.

Witnesses to the theft were two of the museum's guards who continued to work when the city was occupied, but refused to cooperate with Russian forces.

They claim that during the looting, some 70 specialists from occupied Crimea selected exhibits, kept records, and packed items in the museum. None gave their names or positions.

The guards also pointed to a mysterious commandant who personally supervised the removal of valuables — but the details they provided were not sufficient on their own to identify him.

'I personally carried the exhibits out'

Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian Artem Lagoysky was a Kherson blogger known as "Bydlo." When the Russians arrived, he eagerly accepted a post in the occupying regime as deputy minister of culture.

The Kyiv Independent knew he had information about the theft but in order to speak to him and get him to open up, had to pose as Russian journalists making a film about culture in the "territories liberated by Russia."

Believing he was speaking to a "TV producer in Moscow," Lagoysky, speaking from the occupied Ukrainian city of Henichesk, Kherson Oblast, freely admitted that he "personally carried the exhibits from museums during the evacuation."

Lagoysky also revealed the names of other high-ranking officials from occupied Crimea who came to remove artifacts — Elena Morozova, director of the Chersonesos Museum, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, and Mikhail Smorodkin, director of the Sevastopol Defense Museum, one of the largest museums on the occupied peninsula.

Both are Russian citizens who moved to Crimea to take up positions there after the peninsula was occupied in 2014.

"They came in groups, with guys. Everyone helped us," Lagosky added.

To obtain more evidence of their involvement in the museum theft, it was necessary to contact another defector, Oleksandr Kuzmenko, who at the time of the looting was the "minister of culture" in Kherson Oblast. Before the full-scale invasion, he was the director of a local music school.

Kuzmenko no longer holds a minister position and was unlikely to want to speak to Russian journalists, so a different approach was needed — Motorevska called him under the guise of an "investigator from Moscow" looking into how several objects that were supposed to be taken to Russian-controlled territories had appeared on the black market.

During the conversation, Kuzmenko confirmed that both Morozova and Smorodkin were present in Kherson, claiming it was they who decided which exhibits should be taken out of the Local History Museum and which should stay.

"They are experts. They know what is valuable and what is not," Kuzmenko said.

Using the same cover story, Motorevska called another Kherson defector, Andriy Khodchenko, the Local History Museum’s former deputy director, who, after the liberation of Kherson fled to Russia's Krasnodar Krai, a region that shares a border with Ukraine.

Khodchenko also fell for the ruse and confirmed Morozova's presence, also sharing details about another Crimean official, Mikhail Smorodkin, the Sevastopol Defense Museum’s director, claiming at one point he tried to put some of the museum's exhibits into his own car.

"But I pointed it out to the commandant, and the commandant made him move the items into the truck. He said: 'Everything will be loaded here. I will seal everything'," Khodchenko said.

This was confirmation that directors of two museums — the Chersonesos Museum and Sevastopol Defense Museum — were present during the theft. These are also the two museums it was suspected the looted items were taken to.

Now it was time to establish the name of the Russian officer, the commandant of Kherson, who personally participated in, and possibly oversaw, the theft.

"As I remember, the commandant was limping, he walked with a cane... I don't know his last name, but I saw him during the evacuation," Kuzmenko said.

The mysterious commandant

There were clues to his identity — the museum guards said he was wearing the uniform of a colonel, and it was already known he walked with a limp.

Lagoysky said in addition to looting the museums, he and the commandant personally took the remains of Russian military leader Grigory Potemkin from his tomb in St. Catherine's Cathedral in Kherson.

This was even documented — Lagoysky sent photographs of the process to journalists, but the angle of the commandant in the picture prevented identification

Fortunately, Kuzmenko had another photograph which clearly showed the commandant's face, which he sent to the Kyiv Independent via Telegram.

With the help of facial recognition software, he was swiftly identified — Dmitry Lipov, a Russian naval officer with the rank equivalent to a colonel.

It is known from open sources that he is the head of the communications center of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, but his senior position among the occupation authorities of Kherson has not been previously reported.

The Russian defectors interviewed by the Kyiv Independent also said Lipov coordinated his actions with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) — in fact, it was representatives of the FSB who oversaw the entire operation.

Khodchenko reported that FSB officers held meetings in Kherson with museum employees and occupation authorities in Kherson Oblast, and helped organize the theft.

The Kyiv Independent team discovered the FSB officer who led this process was called Vasily, but could not fully identify him.

Destruction of Ukrainian identity

According to Kuzmenko, FSB officers also supervised the removal of valuables from the Art Museum where more than 10,000 works of art, including three paintings by the famous Ukrainian painter Ivan Aivazovsky, were looted.

"(The Russians) were mainly focused on taking paintings, they took those away. They left artworks that were not in very good condition, or that they simply didn’t like,"  the current deputy director Ihor Rusol said.

At least part of the Art Museum's collection is now located in occupied Crimea, at the Taurida Central Museum.

In total, according to the information of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, from six museums in the territories liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2022, the Russians stole almost 35,000 artifacts — the same number of items in the exhibition halls of the Louvre in Paris, France.

The illegal removal of valuables also occurred in the territories that remain under occupation — Ukrainian authorities reported the looting of the Melitopol Local History Museum in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and the Mariupol Local History Museum in Donetsk Oblast.

The scale of the thefts from these museums is impossible to accurately assess at present.

A Russian plan to cover up the theft

Vitalii Tytych is a lawyer and military serviceman. In the first two years of the full-scale war, he documented crimes against cultural heritage as part of a special Territorial Defence Forces unit.

Tytych believes the Russians will, ironically, try to use international law to get away with the thefts, citing the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict to try to convince the world they were not looting, but saving artifacts from possible damage caused by being near the front lines.

"Persecution of museum workers, theft of the records without leaving descriptions or documenting the selection process — it had nothing to do with the actions stipulated by the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property,” Tytych said.

The Local History Museum’s staff together with public initiatives are working to restore the records of the collection stolen by the Russians. Due to the fact Ukraine does not have a unified state register of museum values, this process is complex.

However, the relevant documentation is the basis for establishing the extent of the damage caused to Ukraine and for making claims in the future.

Vitalii Tytych sees the looting of museums as part of Russia's state policy to destroy Ukrainian culture, which has been ongoing since tsarist times.

"The idea of ​​destroying the Ukrainian nation through the destruction of the features of its identity, its distinction from all other 'Russian world' is at the heart of this aggression," Tytych said.