All 52 paintings that the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office put on the wanted list after contacting Interpol belong to Crimean museums.
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The Minister of Culture of the Republic of Crimea, Arina Novoselskaya, told Kommersant about this, clarifying that all the paintings put on the wanted list belong to the Simferopol Art Museum, which in February 2014 organized an exhibition of her paintings in Mariupol.
“Our paintings were exhibited there in the museum, and then, in March of the same year, they returned to Crimea. This is a common practice of inter-museum exchange. When the paintings were returned, a corresponding act was drawn up, it was signed by two parties - two museums,” the department said.
“These paintings belonged to the Simferopol Museum all their lives, and no one lost them. They are in the museum, including “Moonlit Night” by Ivan Aivazovsky, “Road in the Forest” by Ivan Shishkin and others that were mentioned in the media,” Novoselskaya clarified, adding that, if necessary, she is ready to personally conduct a tour for Interpol employees around the Simferopol Art Museum and show all these canvases.
“The Simferopol Museum is the place of permanent “registration” of all these works: most of them have been stored in Simferopol for at least half a century. After the museum's collection was 96% destroyed during the Second World War, the collection was completed from works donated by the country's central museums: the State Hermitage, the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin, Directorate of Art Exhibitions and Panoramas. The new Simferopol collection also includes paintings from the Dresden Art Gallery, the Aachen Surmond-Ludwig Museum, and the Potsdam Palaces and Parks Foundation,” Kommersant reports.