The Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued an order not to conduct an investigation, after receiving a notification from Ukraine that the icon for which the case against Milorad Dodik, the President of Republika Srpska, did not belong to the national cultural heritage of this country, was confirmed for Detektor.
According to the request for international legal assistance, the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina received a response from the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine stating that the mentioned icon is not in the State Register of National Cultural Heritage and that the investigators have closed the case.
“No evidence was found that would indicate that the work of art was illegally moved, stolen from the territory of Ukraine and that it has exceptional artistic value, nor that it belongs to the national cultural heritage of Ukraine and that it is a national value,” states the answer to the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which brought order not to conduct an investigation.
In mid-December 2020, Milorad Dodik, then a member of the BiH Presidency, presented Sergey Lavrov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, with a 300-year-old gilded icon as a sign of “Serbian-Russian” friendship.
The Embassy of Ukraine then requested a meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bisera Turković, and the Chief Prosecutor of the BiH Prosecutor’s Office, Gordana Tadić. The Ukrainian Embassy requested that the icon be returned to this country, because the stamp on the back of the icon unequivocally proves that it is an icon that is Ukrainian cultural heritage, and that has disappeared from that country and belongs exclusively to Ukraine. After that, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov returned the Icon.
In January 2021, the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina opened a case and heard several witnesses, including the ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Russia.
Recently, in another case before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the indictment against Dodik and Miloš Lukić, the acting director of the Official Gazette of the RS, was confirmed for “non-implementation of the decisions of the High Representative”.
The portal reminds that Detektor journalists have not yet received an answer about the number of complaints against Dodik for denying the genocide.
