Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said Ukraine continues to demand from one of the members of Bosnia's ethnically-based power-sharing Presidium, head of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik the return of a centuries-old Orthodox icon, which had earlier been handed as a gift to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"The Ukrainian icon burned the hands of even experienced Russian diplomats who disowned it. But Mr. Dodik continues to lie, doing it better than his elder friends. Ukraine continues to demand the return of the icon," Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
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The Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, presented a Ukrainian icon to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. After that, the Ukrainian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina demanded an explanation from that country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as to how the icon had appeared in the country in the first place.
Subsequently, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that they would return the icon to the side that had presented it so that its history could be traced through Interpol.
According to local media reports, the icon is almost 300 years old and was stored in the Ukrainian city of Luhansk, which is now occupied by Russian-controlled forces.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy intends to appeal to law enforcement agencies with a request to establish a chain of the icon's movement from Ukraine to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The prosecutor's office of Bosnia and Herzegovina has opened a respective criminal case.
