Six Georgians Sentenced in France for Theft of Rare Russian Literary Works from Prestigious Libraries

A Paris court delivered verdicts overnight on June 12–13, 2025, convicting six Georgian nationals — five men and one woman — of criminal conspiracy and, in some cases, theft of cultural assets on public display. The stolen items included rare 19th-century works by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Mikhail Lermontov, with losses estimated at approximately €650,000–€770,000 from the National Library of France (BnF) alone. The thieves employed a meticulous method: visiting libraries under the guise of research, photographing and measuring rare volumes, then returning to replace them with virtually undetectable facsimiles. The heaviest sentence of seven years was handed to Mikheil Z., 50, who had visited the BnF 40 times claiming to research democracy in 19th-century Russian literature; he also faces a permanent ban from French territory. Two defendants were tried in absentia after being arrested in Georgia, which does not extradite its citizens, while two others — Mikheil Z. and Beqa T. — had already been convicted in Lithuania and Estonia respectively for similar offences and were temporarily transferred to France for trial. The case is part of a Europe-wide pattern of library thefts that prompted the creation of a joint Europol-Eurojust investigation team, leading to multiple arrests in 2024. French magistrates have raised the possibility that the thefts are motivated by a desire to repatriate Russian cultural heritage amid heightened tensions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a theory reinforced by the appearance of a stolen Pushkin edition in a Russian auction house catalogue in June 2024.