A French court has sentenced six Georgian citizens (five men and one woman) who stole rare 19th-century Russian classics from prestigious libraries in Paris and Lyon to sentences ranging from 18 months of probation to seven years in prison.
Euronews reports this.
Among the stolen books are the first edition of "Boris Godunov" by Alexander Pushkin from 1825 and books by Mikhail Lermontov.
According to the investigation, the attackers came to libraries supposedly to work with rare editions, photographed and measured them, and then quietly replaced them with fakes. This caused losses of €770 000 to the National Library of France alone.
The prosecutorʼs office called the case "a real treasure theft" and "a large-scale organized operation, planned and carried out with care and cynicism".
The harshest sentence went to 50-year-old Mikhail Z. — seven years in prison and a lifetime ban on entering France. Another defendant, Beka T., was sentenced to four years in prison. Both had previously been convicted of similar crimes in the Baltic states.
Two defendants were tried in absentia — they had already been arrested in Georgia, which does not extradite its citizens.
The case is part of a wave of library thefts across Europe that began after Russiaʼs full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has also affected Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Investigators are linking them to an organized network that may have ties to Moscow. Europol and Eurojust have even set up an international investigation team to investigate.
French law enforcement officials do not rule out that the aim of these thefts was to return Russiaʼs cultural heritage. The basis for such suspicions was the appearance in 2024 at a Russian auction of a rare edition of Pushkinʼs poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus", which coincided with a copy stolen from the National Library of France.
Despite the courtʼs verdict, none of the stolen books have been returned yet. At the same time, the National Library of France said they are not losing hope of finding the missing rarities.
For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine, please follow us on X.