HELSINKI, April 8. /TASS/: Finland’s Foreign Ministry will issue permission to return to Russia the exhibits of Russia’s museum collections the Finnish Customs detained earlier.
"The EU’s new sanctions have been adopted. They will be published in the EU Official Journal later. The amendments will take effect on April 9. These amendments leave the EU countries a chance to issue permission to transporting to Russia cultural items related to official cultural cooperation. The Foreign Ministry will issue permission regarding the cargoes detained in Finland last weekend containing Russian museums-owned cultural artifacts that are returning to Russia from Italy and Japan," the Foreign Ministry said.
Earlier, Russian Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova said on her Telegram channel that the exhibits in question might be back home as soon as this weekend.
Finland’s ambassador in Moscow Antti Helantera was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday to be handed a strong protest over the detention of Russian cultural valuables. The Foreign Ministry stressed that Finland had used the EU’s newly-introduced sanctions as pretext. Earlier, the chief of the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s export supervision office, Teemu Sepponen, said that the Foreign Ministry was currently clearing up the detention affair with the European Commission and no exact dates when this process might be completed had been set yet. He stressed that the exhibits in question remained a property of the Russian museums.
Earlier, Russia’s Culture Ministry said that the detained works of art were part of two exhibition projects in Italy featuring exhibits from the State Hermitage Museum and the museum preserves Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk and Gatchina and also the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Oriental Art and also some items from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which had arrived from Japan.
