KYIV: Ancient Crimean gold treasures returned to Kyiv on Monday after being stuck in a Dutch museum for nine years, where they were on show when Russia seized the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.

Ukraine hailed the arrival of the jewels in the midst of the Russian full-scale 2022 invasion as a victory for its “identity and freedom”.

The Scythian artefacts — some around 2,000 years old — were on loan to Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson museum when they suddenly were at the centre of a geopolitical crisis following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Years of legal battles ensued, with both Kyiv and Moscow-controlled Crimean museums filing suits that the jewels should be in their hands, before the Dutch Supreme Court ruled this summer they should go to Ukraine. “After almost 10 years of trials, artefacts from four museums of Crimea returned to Ukraine,” the National Museum of the History of Ukraine (NMHU) said on its website.

“They will be kept in the NMHU until the de-occupation of Crimea,” it added.

Their return comes 21 months into Moscow’s offensive, and is a symbolic win for Ukraine, which has repeatedly vowed to retake Crimea.

Ukraine’s customs service said the jewels arrived from Amsterdam by truck, equipped with a “temperature maintenance system, in special trunks”. It published a video of the truck entering Kyiv’s medieval Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, where it said customs officers will go through the 2,694 kilogrammes of jewels.

Published in Dawn, November 28th, 2023