Kyiv has welcomed the return of hundreds of Crimean gold treasures after a nine-year legal battle with Moscow, as deadly storms swept southern parts of Russia and Ukraine, and Nato warned that a Kremlin victory in the war would embolden China and other authoritarian states.
“After almost 10 years of court hearings, artefacts from four Crimean museums that were presented at the exhibition Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea in Amsterdam have returned to Ukraine,” the country’s national history museum said on Monday.
“It is there that they will be kept until the de-occupation of Crimea,” the museum added, while calling on the Ukrainian authorities “to provide unprecedented protection, as well as appropriate economic support” to ensure proper safeguarding of the collection.
The artefacts, which include a Scythian gold helmet and gold jewellery as well as ancient Greek, Roman and Sarmatian treasures, were on display at Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.
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Ukraine and Russia then fought over the collection in the Dutch courts, where in June the Netherlands’ supreme court ruled that it should be returned to Kyiv, in a decision that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy called a victory for the “protection of international law”.
Ukrainian media on Monday showed a truck reportedly carrying the treasures pulling into the ancient Lavra monastery in central Kyiv, where customs officials reported the arrival of “2,694kg of cultural property”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the collection: “It belongs in Crimea and should be there.”
At least four people were killed and about two million faced blackouts after fierce storms crashed over Crimea and other southern parts of Ukraine and Russia.
Russia’s energy ministry said power to about 1.9 million people had failed in several southern Russian regions and occupied parts of Ukraine, as heavy rain and winds gusting up to almost 150km/h battered ports and played havoc with shipping in the Black Sea.
“Thank you to all rescuers, utilities workers, the national police, regional and local authorities and energy workers who help people,” Mr Zelenskiy said. “As of [Monday] morning, due to bad weather, more than 2,000 settlements in 16 regions of Ukraine have been cut off, and road traffic has been blocked.”
Officials in the Odesa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast said eight people had received treatment for hypothermia and five for injuries caused by falling trees.
Snow and rain are complicating conditions on the battlefield in eastern and southeastern Ukraine and reducing the likelihood of a major breakthrough by either side in the coming months.
“We need to be prepared for the long haul ... but the price of not supporting Ukraine is much higher than the price of supporting Ukraine,” Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday.
He told CNBC that a Russian victory would be a “tragedy” which would signal “to authoritarian leaders, in Moscow but also in Beijing ... that when they use military force and invade another country, they get what they want.”
