Eradicating a Nation
Russian genocide through art
After Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow began an appalling campaign of genocide, mass torture, the kidnapping and “russification” of Ukrainian children, and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure.
Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine are so significant, that the International Criminal Court in March 2023 issued arrest warrants for Russian president Putin and his commissioner of “childrens rights” (aka chief kidnapper) Maria Lvova-Belova.
However, the attention paid to Russia’s theft and destruction of Ukrainian art and historical artifacts hasn’t gotten the same kind of attention. Maybe most people believe that compared to the atrocities the Russians have committed against the Ukrainian people, art is fairly insignificant. Yes, it’s costly, but it’s only money, right?
It’s not that trivial. The theft of Ukrainian cultural icons and other art is part of Russia’s effort to erase the Ukrainian identity. It’s cultural genocide, meant to delete Ukraine’s culture and history. “Upon taking control of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in 2022,” writes Jade McGlynn in Foreign Policy, “Russia launched an aggressive cultural propaganda campaign characterized by the declaration of annexation anniversaries as national holidays, the standardization of cultural practices to align with Russian norms, the establishment of historical propaganda museums, and the re-Sovietization of street names and monuments.”
Why would the Russians do this? Because Moscow is trying to advance the narrative that Ukraine does not and never has existed, and that it has always been part of Russia. So they reestablish the old Soviet icons, tempt young people into a militarized Russian attitude via the use of social media and other propaganda efforts, and work to erase any vestige of Ukrainian culture.
Museums have been looted, priceless pieces of art, history, and antiquities disappeared, and according to international art experts, the looting and pillaging could be the single biggest collective art theft since World War II, when the Nazis seized an estimated one fifth of all art in Europe in an effort to eradicate “degenerate” art by “racially inferior” races.
The Russians are engaging in similar tactics to eradicate Ukraine from existence.
In Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators say the Russians stole more than 15,000 pieces of fine art and one-of-a-kind artifacts. They dragged bronze statues from parks, lifted books from a riverside scientific library, boxed up the crumbling, 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover, and even stole a raccoon from the zoo, leaving behind a trail of vacant cages, empty pedestals and smashed glass.
No, this is not about the money.
This is about erasing Ukrainian identity and culture, and the effort is staggering and very deliberate.
At one museum in Melitopol, a southern Ukrainian city that the Russians seized in the first days of the war, witnesses said that a mysterious man in a white lab coat had arrived to carefully extract, with gloves and tweezers, the most valuable objects from the collection, including gold pieces from the Scythian empire crafted 2,300 years ago. As he lifted out the priceless antiquities, a squad of Russian soldiers stood firmly behind him, in case anyone should try to stop him.
And now, at least some of the stolen cultural property is surfacing on the black market, according to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin. Authorities and art experts are identifying stolen Ukrainian art in various places, including in Simferopol.
Out of the 125 identified works, 124 are currently in the occupied Crimea, housed in the Simferopol Central Museum of Tavrida. The exact location of one remaining work is unknown, but there is confirmation from the occupiers that it is in their possession.
At the end of July, it was reported that 5 more works stolen by Russia had been identified.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) has created a specialized unit that works with the US FBI to save Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Kostin says that the special unit “is not only engaged in investigating cases of cultural heritage destruction due to shelling but also in cases where our cultural heritage is being illegally sold abroad.”
Art moves assets.
Art is a pretty common tactic that can help malign actors move assets and launder illicitly gained funds. The Basel Institute on Governance—an independent, international organization dedicated to preventing and combating corruption and other financial crimes—notes that sales of art and antiques by dealers and auction houses reached an estimated more than $65.1 billion in 2021, and because the art sector is considered niche, and expensive works of art are moved via art galleries, dealers, and auction houses every year, the sector is attractive to illicit actors as a way to move assets without too much scrutiny.
Art is portable. Art is expensive. No one bats an eyelash if expensive art moves around the globe. Art isn’t as regulated as other sectors as far as money laundering goes, and anonymity is prevalent. So if a malign actor wants to move assets through art, it’s easier than other methodologies.
The appreciation of art is subjective. So too is its value. Unlike other high-value assets such as real estate, the exact value of an artwork can be extremely volatile and difficult to predict. Consequently, it is easy for criminals to manipulate the monetary amounts involved in art transactions without raising suspicion.
For example in 2017, an art dealer was caught by undercover US federal agents proposing to launder the funds of a stock manipulation scheme through a series of staged transactions involving a Picasso painting, Personnages. The dealer proposed to sell the artwork to the agent for an arbitrary figure (the exact amount of proceeds of crime from a stock manipulation offence) then buy back the artwork at an agreed reduced price. The difference in price would serve as the dealer’s fee, and the latter transaction would make it seem like the agent had received the proceeds of crime through a legitimate source.
Freeport facilities are also a risk and are used by bad actors to move art, says the EU.
Free ports are warehouses in free zones, which were – originally – intended as spaces to storemerchandise in transit. They have since become popular for the storage of substitute assets, including art, precious stones, antique, gold and wine collections – often on a permanent basis. Apart from secure storage, sales arguments in the free port business include the deferral of import duties and indirect taxes such as VAT or user tax as well as a high degree of secrecy.
The Russians, in an effort to erase the Ukrainian identity, have to do something with the looted art and artifacts they acquired. The UK’s National Crime Agency last ytear issued an alert to artwork storage facilities, warning of potential criminal exploitation of the sector by sanctioned Russians.
The artworks’ value is undeniable, and their benefit in helping move misappropriated assets is incalculable, especially since the regulations governing money laundering and terrorist financing through the sector are not consistent.
German screenwriter Lukas Becker early last year wrote that both Russian and Ukrainian units dig up ancient objects while fortifying their positions in Ukraine. And while Ukrainian soldiers do send back artifacts they discover on the battlefield, Russian soldiers have been supplementing their pay and enriching themselves by selling pictures, statuettes, mosaics, coins, vases, gems, and busts taken from archaeological excavation sites and private property in Ukraine.
The Justice Department last year unsealed an indictment against diamond smuggler and art collector Nazem Ahmad, who DOJ says dealt in millions of dollars in goods and services, violation global terrorism sanctions. Ahmad was sanctioned by OFAC in 2019 for being a Hizballah financier, but he used a complex web of business entities to obtain valuable artwork from US artists and art galleries anyway.
Russian oligarchs are also taking advantage of the art market to move billions in assets. A bipartisan congressional report in 2020 revealed that sanctioned Russian oligarchs, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, made more than $18 million in high value art purchases from US auction houses and private sellers via three shell companies linked to the designated Russians.
Detection and Deterrence.
Anonymity in the art sector makes looted art difficult to trace, but work is progressing in that sphere. The UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in coordination with Poland’s Culture Ministry, has been training law enforcement in countries bordering Ukraine on its west side to identify and recover art that Russia has looted from Ukraine. UNESCO is also helping collect evidence and compile lists of missing objects from Ukraine’s museums, religious buildings, and archeological sites.
Art market participants can also use databases such as the Art Loss Register to perform due diligence and ensure goods have not been looted from wartorn Ukraine. The country’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has also created a new “War & Art” database of artworks that have been bought and sold by sanctioned Russians since 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea.
The US Treasury in 2022 released a study on illicit finance in the high-value art market. The study found that there is some evidence of money laundering risk in the high-value art market, and the participants most vulnerable to money laundering in the sector are businesses that offer financial services, such as art- collateralized loans, but are not subject to comprehensive AML/CFT obligations.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) last year noted that the use of cash, the role of intermediaries and legal persons, shell companies and other complex corporate structures, fictitious sales and false auctions, and under or over-pricing are just some of the methodologies used to move assets in the art and antiquities market.
Sound familiar? It should. These are some of the most common money-laundering methodologies, and they should be applied in the art world as Russians continue to abuse the sector to hide and move looted Ukrainian artifacts and historical objects.
Ethnic cleansing by any other name... is STILL ethnic cleansing!