Polish authorities have detained a well-known Russian scholar, Aleksander Butyagin, a researcher at the Hermitage Museum. Poland’s RMF FM reported that officers from the Internal Security Agency arrested him at a hotel in Warsaw. Media outlets say he had been giving lectures across Europe and was transiting through the Polish capital while travelling from the Netherlands to Belgrade.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office has been seeking Butyagin since November. As head of the Hermitage’s ancient archaeology department, he helped lead excavation teams in Crimea after Russia seized the peninsula in 2014. Ukrainian investigators say he and his team carried out unauthorised excavations at the Myrmekion archaeological site in Kerch, causing partial destruction of a protected cultural monument and damage estimated at more than 200 million hryvnias.
“During the excavations, the team led by Butyagin uncovered a hoard of 30 gold coins — 26 bearing the name of Alexander the Great and four minted under his brother Philip III Arrhidaeus. The find was seized by Russian authorities,” the Polish outlet Polsat reported.
After his detention, Butyagin was questioned at the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw, where he declined to make a statement. Following the questioning, the prosecutor — citing extradition rules and the Polish-Ukrainian agreement on legal assistance — submitted a request for his temporary arrest. A court approved the motion and ordered Butyagin held for 40 days.
Ukraine will now send Poland a formal extradition request. Once the documents arrive, a court will examine them and decide whether there are grounds to transfer the suspect to Ukrainian custody. The charges he faces carry a potential prison sentence of one to ten years.
Polish authorities have already informed the Russian diplomatic mission of his detention. In Russia, Butyagin’s scheduled lectures for later this month are being cancelled. He had been due to speak on 19 December at an event in Moscow titled “Ancient Monsters in Myth and Art.”
Polish outlet Onet reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov weighed in on the case, calling the arrest “an arbitrary use of power” and “a legal scandal.” “The most important thing now is to secure his release,” he said.
After Russia’s occupation of Crimea, nearly 1.5 million cultural objects fell under Moscow’s control, including thousands of museum artefacts spanning multiple historical eras. Before the occupation, the peninsula had 31 museum institutions, the Sudak Fortress — a branch of the National Preserve “Saint Sophia of Kyiv” — and roughly 350 public and departmental museums operating across various institutions. In Sevastopol alone, sites included the national preserve “Tauric Chersonese,” the Balaklava Naval Museum Complex, and the Military-Historical Museum of the Black Sea Fleet, which was under Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence.
Researchers say it remains impossible to fully assess the scale of cultural losses in Crimea or in other occupied territories.
