With meticulous care, Russian military went into a museum in Melitopol, a city of 150,000 in southeast Ukraine, leading a man in wearing a white lab coat and gloves to the collection of 2,400 year old gold relics, where city officials say, the man selected items to be shipped to Russia, the New York Times reports.
“The orcs have taken hold of our Scythian gold,” declared Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fyodorov, using a derogatory term many Ukrainians reserve for Russian soldiers. “This is one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine, and today we don’t know where they took it.”
Ukrainian officials say the looting is going on around the nation, but it is not uncontrolled looting by Russian soldiers. Instead, it is the selected theft of historical items, apparently targeted for their provenance as well as their value.
Officials have documented the theft of art, relics and religious icons from government offices, cultural heritage sites, museums and churches in the towns occupied by the Russians; officials say 250 locations were robbed. In the majority of cases, it has been an organized and targeted theft.