street art legend
Police prevent theft of Banksy artwork in Ukraine – criminal case initiated
STORY: According to their own statements, the Ukrainian police prevented the theft of a Banksy artwork. The British street artist’s work, which depicts a woman wearing a gas mask and holding a fire extinguisher, was displayed on the wall of a burned-out building in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. According to their own statements, the police received a message on Friday that someone was trying to remove the graffiti from the wall. At the crime scene, officers encountered a group of several suspects. “The organizer is a young person who was born in Kyiv in 1990. He decided to dismantle and take away the drawing. Obviously, he thought that the building would be destroyed and demolished and the drawing would be lost,” says the police chief of the region Kyiv, Andrii Nebytov. He added that a criminal case had been opened and the removed artwork was being kept by the police. The cities in the Kyiv region, where several Banksy artworks appeared in November, were occupied by Russia until April. They had been badly damaged by the fighting in the first days of the war.
Police say they caught a group of young people trying to steal a Banksy picture from the wall of a damaged house in the Kyiv area.
Ukrainian police on Friday foiled the theft of an artwork attributed to famous British artist Banksy. In Hostomel near Kyiv, a group removed the work from the wall of a house destroyed by the Russians, said the governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksiy Kuleba, in the online service Telegram. He also published a photo showing a wall from which part of the wall paneling has been removed.
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These are the Banksy pictures in war-torn Ukraine
Banksy work shows woman with gas mask
Stenciled graffiti on the wall previously showed a woman in a bathrobe with a gas mask and a fire extinguisher standing on a chair. According to Kuleba, the police arrested several people at the scene. The “drawing is in good condition and is in the hands of the security forces,” he explained. “Banksy’s works in the Kyiv region are under police protection.” According to the regional police chief, eight people between the ages of 27 and 60 who may have been involved in the incident have been identified from Kyiv and Cherkassy, about 200 kilometers south-east of the capital. A preliminary investigation into property damage had been initiated.
Banksy graffiti had surfaced in November
In early November, stencil graffiti in the style of Banksy appeared in Kyiv and the surrounding area. In mid-November, the artist published photos of a work on a bombed building in Borodyanka, also a suburb of Kiev, on his account on the online service Instagram, thus confirming his authorship. He later posted more photos of his stencil graffiti in Ukraine, as well as a video. Borodyanka and Hostomel, along with Bucha and Irpin, were badly hit by Russian bombing during the war.