Ukraine will hand over more than a hundred pictures to the Netherlands, returning World War Two booty stored in museum cellars in the capital Kiev, President Leonid Kuchma said on Monday.
Ukraine, a former Soviet state that will border an expanded European Union next month, said it would return 139 drawings by German masters mainly from the 15th and 16th centuries which were part of the Koenigs collection.
"We made a decision to return to the legitimate owner, the Netherlands, art objects from the famous collection of Franz Koenigs," Kuchma said at a joint news conference with Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkendende.
The issue of returning war booty seized by the Soviet Army from Nazi Germany after World War Two is a sensitive issue in the former Soviet Union, where many believe they have a right to keep trophies after they lost thousands of citizens in the war.
Franz Koenig, a German banker who obtained Dutch citizenship in early 1939, assembled a collection of old master drawings which eventually numbered 2,671.
The Koenigs collection was broken up and sold at a fraction of its value during the war, with many of the paintings ending up in private art collections of dictator Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Some 528 pictures have been missing since the war.
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