The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense and the State Archival Service of Ukraine have published the names of individuals involved in the illegal removal of Ukrainian archival materials from the temporarily occupied territories and their subsequent integration into the Russian archival infrastructure in the “Stolen Heritage” section of the War&Sanctions portal.
This was reported by the intelligence press service.
Among them are: Andrey Artizov — head of the Russian State Archive; Oleg Lobov — head of the so-called “State Archival Service of the Republic of Crimea”; Irina Krasnonos — director of the so-called “Sevastopol City Archive”; Vitaliy Semyonov — founder and head of the public organization “Archival Watch”; employees of the so-called “State Archive of the Republic of Crimea” who directly participated in the illegal removal of state archival collections from the Kherson region in 2022.
It is noted that since 2014, more than 5 million documents of the National Archival Fund of Ukraine (NAF) — which constitute an integral part of national and world cultural heritage — have fallen under Russian occupation.
A significant portion of these archives was illegally removed from the occupied territories of Ukraine — in particular from Crimea, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as the Kherson region.
In particular, after the liberation of Kherson, it was established that the Russian occupiers illegally removed nearly 360,000 storage units of NAF documents. These actions constitute a gross violation of the norms of international humanitarian law, in particular the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of May 14, 1954.
