The Kherson museum identified 100 paintings taken to Crimea by the occupiers

Employees of the Kherson Art Museum identified 100 paintings stolen by the Russians during their escape from the city. 99 of them are in the annexed Crimea.

This is stated on the Facebook page of the Kherson Art Museum by Oleksii Shevkunenko.

The paintings were recognized thanks to the plot of one of the Russian TV channels, filmed in Simferopol's Central Tavrida Museum in September 2023.

Among the most recently identified works are paintings by artists Ivan Shulha «Fishermen on the Seashore», Yefrem Zverkov «Grey Day» and Venera Takaieva «Daughter Guzel».

«The names of Ivan Shulha and Venera Takaieva are associated with the Kherson region. Shulha was born here, Takaieva has been living and working in Kherson since the mid-1950s. Yefrem Zverkov is a 60-year-old artist, one of the founders of the «strict style, which is one of the most famous Russian landscape painters of the 20th century,» the report says.

We will remind that on May 23, 2022, armed men in civilian clothes visited the Kherson Art Museum, who announced an «inventory» of the collection. On November 1, the Russian occupiers looted the art museum in Kherson. On November 3, the police began to investigate the case, which was opened due to the fact of the robbery of valuables of the Kherson Art Museum by the Russian military.

99 paintings, according to the museum staff, are located in the Central Museum of Tavrida. The location of another one, «lit» in Henichesk, is unknown (perhaps somewhere in the same Henichesk, although this is only a guess), but the kidnappers confirm that «Phaeton in Sevastopol» by Konstantin Korovin is somewhere in their possession.

Later, the Oleksii Shevkunenko Kherson Art Museum identified three more paintings from its collection that the Russian occupiers stole and took to the temporarily occupied Crimea.