Butyagin is an archaeologist who spent many years conducting excavations in Crimea. In December 2025, he was detained in Poland at Ukraine’s request; Ukraine considered his work there after 2014 to be illegal and accused him of destroying a cultural heritage site. On April 28, Butyagin was released as part of a prisoner exchange.
This text is a brief retelling of the archaeologist’s first interview after his release, which he gave to the Russian state propaganda outlet RT. The speaker’s remarks have been edited for coherence. Their meaning and context have been preserved in full.
Sitting in prison with nothing to do is a grim business. Better to have some action, even unpleasant action — an arrest, a holding cell, a court hearing. Poland had no use for me; they simply wanted to hand me over to Ukraine. They treated me as a formality — just sit there and wait. The negative interest in my work began as early as 2019. Archaeologists are not looters — they do science. I believe the response of the European scientific community was inadequate. Individual people wrote letters in my support, and I’m grateful to them, but on the whole, the community could have spoken up more forcefully. Honestly, I was hoping for an exchange. When I found out about it, I was glad — but not surprised. It’s nice that my country came to my aid, and I’ll remember that. The illusion that science exists outside of politics has been shattered. My case is a very bad precedent for the entire world. It frightens scholars and works against science. The world has changed in a terrible way. The police officer who escorted me to court lamented, “You know, even scholars are being arrested now. Such are the times.”
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