The latest arms delivery to Ukraine is remarkable to say the least.
Three rusty iron swords and a polished stone ax head.
At a time when President Volodymyr Zelensky is always asking for more weapons and ammunition, the strange set presented on March 10 at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington seems incongruous to say the least.
Does the first world power only have antiquities left to line up against the Russian armies?
None of that.
On that day, the United States was not offering, but restoring.
The US Customs and Border Protection Service handed over a batch of old weapons seized in early September at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
According to information provided by customs, this set had arrived in the United States in two separate packages;
the first was sent from Krasnodar region, Russia, east of the Crimean peninsula, and the second was from
"Ukrainian territory"
.
The recipient is a person known to the American services and to whom more than twenty packages of the same kind were sent between July and September last.
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According to Ukrainian archaeologists from the National Academy of Sciences dispatched to the site to authenticate the objects, the three swords date from around the 6th-5th century BC, according to a Foreign Policy journalist present at the
restitution
.
Either mid-Iron Age weapons, possibly Scythian.
All the objects, including the polished stone ax head, were estimated to come from Ukrainian territory by the experts involved.
"The Ukrainians who held these swords centuries ago were probably fighting for their homes, as we are fighting today,"
Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova said at the ceremony, lumping together the ancient and current populations. from the country.
In November, the International Council of Museums (Icom) launched a red list of Ukrainian cultural property at risk, to prepare international authorities and art professionals for the expected influx of looted objects in Ukraine.
According to the Ukrainian Minister of Culture, 40 museums have been looted since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, notably in Kherson and Mariupol.
According to UNESCO, 207 Ukrainian cultural sites have been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of the Russian invasion last February.