The former director of the Mariupol Local History Museum has been served with an in-absentia notice of suspicion for personally handing five original paintings to Russian occupation authorities. According to the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office, the investigation found that at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the suspect used her access to the museum’s storage to illegally remove five paintings from the Arkhip Kuindzhi Art Museum, a branch of the Local History Museum.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “First, she moved them to her own home, and later, following agreements with representatives of the occupation administration, she personally handed them over to the invaders,” the prosecutor’s office said. The stolen paintings include Ivan Aivazovsky’s “Off the Coast of the Caucasus,” Arkhip Kuindzhi’s “Red Sunset,” “Autumn. Crimea,” and “Elbrus,” as well as Grigory Kalmykov’s “Kundzhi Feeding Pigeons.” “In this way, the suspect facilitated the enemy’s misappropriation of unique works of art that were an integral part of Mariupol’s cultural heritage,” the prosecutor’s office said. Art expertise valued the five original canvases at HR.26,362,500 (about $587,679). Reportedly, the paintings were subsequently transported to the so-called “Donetsk Republican Museum” in Russian-occupied Donetsk and illegally entered the Russian register of museum values, administered by Russia’s Ministry of Culture.