Yegor Mostovshikov

For more than three decades, members of the international art community have suspected Russia to be a “black hole of art crime.” Icons, ancient books, manuscripts, engravings, medals, orders, old musical instruments and jewelry have allegedly been stolen. Museums, private collections, churches, and library almanacs, they claim, are robbed. The market is flooded with forgeries: some estimates suggest up to 90 percent of Russian artists’ paintings are fakes. All stolen art pieces eventually resurface somewhere—that's the law of the market. For years, this shadowy underbelly of the art world was one of Yegor Mostovshikov’s journalistic beats. And now he is working on “Identity Looted”—an investigation into the systematic looting of over 480,000 Ukrainian artworks by Russia, which would be the largest art heist since the Nazis. Creative narrative non-fiction reporting, in-depth research, expert interviews, OSINT, and tracing the fate of Ukraine's stolen treasures aim to reveal the extent of this fraudulent activity.