2023-11-27 14:54:00
Russia claims Netherlands returns “Crimea gold” to Ukraine
November 27, 2023, 3:54 p.m. Listen to article
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In 2014, Crimea loaned a valuable treasure to Amsterdam for exhibition purposes. When Moscow then occupied the peninsula, a dispute broke out over the “Crimea gold”. However, a court awarded the collection to Ukraine. Now the cultural assets will be handed over to Kiev.
According to official information, the gold treasure known as “Crimean gold” has returned to Ukraine from the Netherlands after almost ten years. Historians at the Ukrainian National History Museum in Kiev thanked Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum for carefully preserving the items and helping them return home.
The “Crimean gold” is around 2,000 years old.
(Foto: picture alliance / dpa)
The approximately 2,000-year-old gold treasure, also known as “Scythian gold,” came to Amsterdam in 2014 from four museums on the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula for exhibition purposes. After Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea Peninsula that same year, Moscow laid claim to the treasure. The exhibits remained in the Netherlands until the legal situation was clarified.
In the summer of 2023, the High Council in The Hague rejected the Russian claim and ordered the return of the valuable cultural assets to Ukraine. The gold “belongs to Crimea and must be there,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in an initial reaction to the return of the treasures to Kiev. Meanwhile, the Moscow-appointed governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, announced that he wanted to resolve the legal property dispute militarily – through a victory in the Russian war of aggression.
According to the Kiev Museum, the returned objects amounted to 565 items. These include ancient sculptures, Scythian and Sarmatian jewelry, as well as 2,000-year-old Chinese lacquer caskets. The Scythians, who gave the collection their name, were an equestrian people in the steppes north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia.
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