Director of a Moscow museum: “We won’t give up Crimea, but Ukraine will have to pay”
Initially, it was clear that Scythian gold from the Crimean museums in the Netherlands, where this collection was exhibited, would not be returned to the peninsula.
The director of the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, Elizaveta Likhacheva, said this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, giving an assessment decision of the court of appeal Amsterdam on the transfer of Scythian gold to Ukraine.
According to her, both Russian and Ukrainian museum legislation was written from Soviet models, and therefore the “rules of the game” are very similar.
“According to Russian laws, the objects that we store and study do not belong to museums. They belong to the state, in this case to Ukraine. Accordingly, the museum receives the right of operational management. And this is common practice. If we are talking about similar situations in the world, as a rule, the court decides to return the exhibits to the state,” Likhacheva told Moskovsky Komsomolets.
She added that in the case of Scythian gold there is a subtlety regarding the fact that the objects are stored where they are found.
“But this is a dubious argument, if you remember about the Parthenon marble and the Egyptian collection of the Louvre. From a legal point of view, it was clear from the very beginning that the gold would be returned to Ukraine,” says the director of the museum.
She also added, “there is a legal dispute between the countries.”
“It will not end until the issue with the status of Crimea is resolved, and here the Scythian treasures are not the most serious problem. Logically, much of what was stored on the peninsula was the property of Kyiv. Sooner or later we will have to buy it back and pay compensation. Of course, we will not give up Crimea. But if Ukraine goes to court, it will win,” Likhacheva believes.
Likhacheva was appointed director of the museum in 2017 by order of the then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. True, before this, 29 museum employees sent a letter to the Minister of Culture and the Prime Minister with a request not to allow the appointment of Likhacheva, as “she received higher education only in 2014, does not have a scientific degree and weight in scientific circles, and has no experience in running either exhibitions or publishing projects, participation in conferences, discussions and round tables.”
Read more: “Experts: Scythian gold has nothing to do with Ukraine”
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.