Ukraine says Russia looted ancient gold artifacts from a museum.
KYIV, Ukraine — The heist started when a mysterious man in a white lab coat showed up at the museum.
A squad of Russian soldiers stood behind him, with guns, watching eagerly.
Using long tweezers and special gloves, the man in the white coat carefully extracted scores of special gold artifacts
more than 2,300 years old from cardboard boxes in the cellar of a museum in Melitopol, a southern town in Russian-occupied territory, Ukrainian officials said.
The gold items were from the Scythian empire and dated back to the fourth century B.C.
Then the mysterious expert, the Russian soldiers and the gold disappeared.
“The orcs have taken hold of our Scythian gold,” declared Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fyodorov, using a derogatory term many Ukrainians reserve for Russian soldiers.
“This is one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine, and today we don’t know where they took it.”
This was hardly the first attack on Ukrainian culture since the war began.
In Mariupol, the town that has been hammered for weeks by Russian forces,
officials said that Russian agents broke into an art museum and stole masterpiece paintings, a famous sculpture and several highly valued Christian icons.
Across Ukraine, officials said, dozens of Orthodox churches, national monuments and cultural heritage sites have been destroyed.
In one town near Kyiv, Borodianka, Russian soldiers shot the bust of a famous Ukrainian poet in the head.
On Saturday, Ukrainian officials said that more than 250 cultural institutions had been damaged or destroyed.
What was stolen: at least 198 gold items, including ornaments in the form of flowers; gold plates; rare old weapons; 300-year-old silver coins; and special medals. She said many of the gold artifacts had been given to the Scythians by the Greeks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/world/europe/ukraine-scythia-gold-museum-russia.html
