Alexander Butiagin made a mistake that is difficult to understand: traveling with great fanfare through countries allied to Ukraine. One of the archaeologists entered Poland on December 4 to give a lecture on Pompeii. Warsaw was one of the stops on a speaking tour of Europe about the legacy of the Roman city buried by the lava of Vesuvius in the 1st century AD. Polish police arrested him at his hotel and he has been in preventive detention ever since.
An international arrest warrant issued by the Ukrainian justice system was pending for Butyagin. He is accused of looting and damaging a former Greek colony in Crimea, .
The Warsaw prosecutor’s office received the extradition request from the Ukrainian authorities on December 23. The prosecutor is in favor of extradition, but the judge must decide. The court has extended the period of preventive detention for Butiaguin until March 4. The Russian Foreign Ministry has demanded his release, accusing Poland of carrying out a political trial without legal basis against the Hermitage’s head of Black Sea archaeology.
Butyagin, 54, is one of the leading experts on Ancient Greece in Russia. From a young age his passion was the Greek colony of Myrmetium, founded in the 6th century BC in the Kerch region, in Crimea. His doctoral thesis was based on Myrmecio and from 1999 he led the excavations at the site from the Hermitage. This area was, since the 1930s, the archaeological responsibility of the cultural institutions of Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was known during the Soviet Union.
Butyagin’s lawyer in Warsaw, as reported by the Russian agency TASS, has argued that his client has continued his work in Crimea during these years under legal protection, first under independent Ukraine (since 1991, the Russian Federation recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine and Crimea as part of it) and then, under Russian sovereignty. rejected as illegitimate, Russia unilaterally considers the Black Sea peninsula as part of its territory.
Ukraine issued the international arrest warrant in 2024. The prosecution’s accusation alleged that Butyagin has looted treasures from Myrmecio and damaged the place in his work from 2014 to 2025. The damage to the Ukrainian State amounts to 206 million hryvnias (four million euros), according to the accusation. If extradited, the Russian academic can be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison, according to Ukrainian law.
Part of the artifacts unearthed by Butyagin and his team since 2014 have been transferred to Saint Petersburg to be restored and others are in museums in Crimea, according to what the occupying authorities have explained to the Russian media.
Crimea has been inhabited and coveted by multiple civilizations over the centuries. The rich archaeological heritage of this Black Sea peninsula is one of the most important cultural battles Ukraine is waging against Russian occupation. The greatest success achieved by kyiv came in 2023, when the Allard Pierson museum in Amsterdam returned to the National Museum of History in kyiv a collection of Scythian artefacts (4th century BC), especially gold ornaments. , when he was exhibiting it after being transferred by the Crimean authorities shortly before the Russian invasion. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered in 2023 that these assets be returned to their rightful owner, the Ukrainian State.
