Stolen Dutch Art Shows Up in Ukraine, but Getting It Back Isn’t Easy - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/arts/international/stolen-dutch-art-ukraine.html
For a decade, the whereabouts of the stolen works remained a mystery, and the assumption was that they had disappeared into the murky world of international art theft.
Then, this summer, representatives of an ultranationalist militia in Ukraine contacted the Dutch Embassy in Kiev, saying the group had discovered the art in a villa near Donetsk that had belonged to the government of the deposed president Viktor F. Yanukovych and was prepared to return it.
“They said that as a good gesture, we want to hand over the paintings,” Ad Geerdink, the director of the Westfries Museum, which went public with the case last week in an effort to recover the works before they could be sold on the black market, said on Saturday, “but since we risked our lives to save the paintings, we expect something in return. And that something, of course, was money.”