Russians stole a famous painting by Viktor Zaretskyі from the Kherson Art Museum

On October 17, 2025, a large-scale retrospective exhibition dedicated to the artist’s 100th anniversary opened at the Taras Shevchenko National Museum in Kyiv. It features more than 100 paintings from leading museum and private collections, demonstrating Zaretskyі’s multifaceted talent and his own language of Ukrainian modernism, initiating the style of Ukrainian neo-Secession.

“The painting “Ukrainian Anna Struk” from the collection of the Oleksiy Shovkunenko Kherson Art Museum could also be presented at this exhibition. It could… But now it is illegally in Crimea, in the Central Museum of Taurida, where the Russians took it after the robbery of the museum in the fall of 2022,” representatives of the Kherson Art Museum reported.

This looting, which the Russians cynically called “evacuation” or “preservation of cultural values,” has been documented as a war crime. Each stolen work is a part of the national memory that they are trying to destroy or appropriate.

This fact reminds us of the scale of the cultural catastrophe caused by Russian aggression and the need to protect and return Ukrainian cultural values.