Alexander Butyagin, the pinnacle of the sector of historical archaeology of the northern Black Sea area of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, was arrested in Poland in December 2025 on the request of Ukraine, which is in search of his extradition to face trial in Ukraine. He’s being charged with conducting unlawful excavations in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. An appeals court docket in Warsaw upheld his arrest in February, and his detention has since been prolonged to 1 June.
Antiquities and archaeological heritage are central to Russia’s marketing campaign to assert Ukrainian territory and identification, not simply in Crimea however in different occupied Ukrainian territories comparable to Zaporizhzhia. Russian President Vladimir Putin marked his curiosity in archaeology in a staged dive for Greek amphorae within the Black Sea in 2011.
Ukraine, in response, has positioned dozens of Russian archaeologists and Ukrainians working for Russia in illegally occupied territories on discover by including them to Conflict and Sanctions, an internet registry created by its Defence Intelligence company. The checklist additionally consists of Italian researchers who participated in a collaborative venture by the Russian Geographical Society (which has been chaired by Putin since 2010) and Italia Nostra referred to as Genoese Fortresses of Crimea and the Black Sea-Azov Basin.
The Butyagin-led State Hermitage Museum expedition to Myrmekion, an historical Greek colony in Crimea, illegally eliminated 30 cash
Picture: Maria Kylosova
Unlawful excavations
Butyagin, who led the Hermitage’s archaeological expedition to Myrmekion, an historical Greek colony in Crimea, was listed on Conflict and Sanctions in February 2025 for violation of Ukrainian regulation and seizing—“in favour of the Russian Federation”—30 gold cash, together with 26 inscribed with the title of Alexander the Nice. He was detained whereas on a lecture tour of Europe. Ukrainian prosecutors introduced a prison investigation of Butyagin in November 2024 for illegally conducting excavations “with none permits from the competent authorities of Ukraine”.
In January, Russia’s overseas ministry referred to as the costs towards Butyagin “absurd” and stated his work was “enriching the cultural heritage of the peoples of Crimea”. In a newspaper column, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, denounced Butyagin’s arrest as psychological stress and in contrast sanctions towards Russia to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in the course of the Second World Conflict. At a Could 2024 information convention in St Petersburg with Piotrovsky, Butyagin referred to the museum’s ties to Crimea since tsarist Russia. “For the Hermitage, Crimea is among the precedence areas the place archaeologists collaborating with the Hermitage have been actively working since pre-revolutionary occasions,” he stated.
Russian students, even some residing in exile and against Putin, have defended Butyagin and different archaeologists working in occupied Ukraine as devoted scientists reasonably than ideologues. Nonetheless, Elmira Ablyalimova-Chyihoz, a venture supervisor on the Kyiv-based Crimean Institute for Strategic Research (CISS), tells The Artwork Newspaper: “The argument that archaeologists are ‘folks of tradition’, engaged in scholarly work, confuses occupation with accountability. Archaeology doesn’t exist exterior authorized frameworks.” Ablyalimova-Chyihoz says it’s not acceptable to assert that Russians have the best to conduct excavations in Crimea as a result of they’ve accomplished so for hundreds of years “on the idea of cultural mission”.
Narrative reframing
CISS specialises within the distant monitoring of heritage websites in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Amongst them is the Historic Metropolis of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora, an archeaologically wealthy Unesco World Heritage Web site in Crimea reduce off from worldwide oversight since 2014. A 2025 CISS report authored by Olena Klenina, Denys Yashnyi and Ablyalimova-Chyihoz detailed how Russian archaeologists and the Russian Orthodox Church proceed to inflict vital harm to Tauric Chersonese each by bodily destruction and the “narrative reframing” of Chersonese as a “symbolic ‘cradle of Orthodoxy’ that reduces “the location to a single civilisational narrative [and] distorts its multi-layered Greek, Roman, Byzantine and medieval dimensions”, Ablyalimova-Chyihoz says.
Russia has promoted its narrative, centred on Chersonese as the location of the baptism into Orthodoxy of Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv in 988, in new museums and a monastery there managed by Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, a senior cleric who has formed Putin’s ideology.
“Cultural heritage turns into instrumentalised to legitimise up to date political claims,” Ablyalimova-Chyihoz says. “When archaeology serves ideology reasonably than scholarship, skilled ethics are compromised.”
Irina Tarsis, the founding father of the New York- and Zurich-based Heart for Artwork Legislation, saysthat in line with Ukrainian regulation, licences have been required since 2004 to conduct analysis at heritage websites, and illicit excavations are categorised as against the law. “This case is extra vital than it appears as a result of it rests on the premise that Crimea is a part of Ukraine and never the Russian Federation,” Tarsis says. “Butyagin actually took a threat by travelling to a rustic which has an extradition cooperation with Ukraine.”
