The people of the Greeks called Scythians were formidable warriors and nomads who ruled the eastern part of the world for more than a thousand years.
Many of the gold weapons and ornaments they left behind end up in museums in the region. Much Scythian gold, along with millions of other priceless artefacts, has been looted orevacuated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February.
After the invasion, Serhii Telizhenko, of the National Institute of Archaeology in Kyiv, realized there would be losses, but he couldn't imagine the scale.
Museums were able to move their collections in a timely manner. The most important collection of Scythian gold is located in Melitopol and is included in the list. Shramko and her colleagues have been spending their nights close to their Scythian and Bronze Age treasures.
The German Archaeological Institute in Berlin has been giving money and materials to the Ukrainians. If they were closer, they thought they could protect the objects better.
The rapidity of the Russian occupation in the east of the country meant that many museums had no time to put in their plans to evacuate. Telizhenko said that the local history museums in the Donetsk region and Luhansk had been destroyed.
The museum of local lore in Mariupol, which had an important collection of Scythian gold, was badly damaged in the spring, and in April Russian media announced that about 2,000 objects had been removed from it. Valuable paintings by Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky are included.
The material taken from the museums has ended up in the peninsula. According to Telizhenko, employees of the Chersonese state museum arrived at the Kherson regional museum in October to remove its collection.
Sources in the country as well as exchanges in virtual forums being monitored from outsideUkraine corroborate the report. A website set up by the Ukrainian government to record "culture crimes" has documented many of the destruction and removal of objects.
Images of damaged archaeological sites can be found on the website. The current conflict was preceded by some of the destruction. The bronze age burial mounds near the village of Dovhe in the Luhansk region were the site of defensive structures being built by Russian troops. He said that the integrity of the site was lost. The warring parties use the terrain for self-defense.
In places where people did the same things hundreds and thousands of years ago, they dig in for defense. The princes of Kyiv built ramparts up to nine metres high in the 10th century in order to repel eastern marauders.
The head of illegal trade research at the Heritage Management Organisation said that the loss of ancient sites' integrity was more serious than the loss of priceless artifacts. He said that the information comes from the relationship between everything and the site.
There had been organised removal efforts by the Russians in territories they had occupied, and most of the time they were done by Russians. Legal nihilism is a big problem in both societies. People don't think the law is applied fairly.
Some collections have already been moved into Russia, according to his monitoring. Russian looters are targeting sites that they think are of high value for antiquities.
Friederike Fless, president of the German Archaeological Institute, said it was similar to when the Red Army stripped eastern German, Ukrainian and other museums. Priam's treasure, a cache of priceless objects from Troy, was among the collections spirited out of Berlin.
There is a silver lining to the gloomy picture for Ukraine. One of the last surviving cultures of Neolithic Europe was found at a previously unknown site. He and his colleagues hunker down to write up their finds when the power is on. He said that this year has been fruitful from a scientific point of view.
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