Poland has exchanged the Russian archaeologist Alexander Butyagin; he was due to be extradited to Ukraine
This has been reported by the Polish media outlets Polsat News and RMF24.
The US Ambassador to Belarus, John Cole, stated that his team had secured the release from Belarus of three Poles and two Moldovans. Among those released is journalist Andrzej Pochobut, who spent five years in a Belarusian prison for criticising Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.
“This day would not have been possible without President Donald Trump and his decisions,” said Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski.
According to him, this was a prisoner exchange between Russia and Belarus on the one hand, and Poland and Belarus on the other.
Belarusian media reported that this exchange marked “the culmination of a complex and protracted negotiation process between the Belarusian KGB and the Polish intelligence service, conducted on the direct orders of the President of Belarus”. These negotiations, they said, began in September 2025, with seven countries involved.
In return, Poland handed over to Russia the Russian archaeologist Alexander Butyagin, who had been detained at Ukraine’s request, despite the fact that a Polish court had previously approved his extradition to Ukraine, reports the BBC’s Russian service.
Alexander Butyagin: what is known about him
The Polish Internal Security Agency took Alexander Butyagin into custody on 4 December 2025, whilst he was passing through Warsaw on his way from the Netherlands to the Balkans.
On the Hermitage’s website, the scholar is described as the curator of archaeological collections from ancient settlements on the Bosphorus and from burial mounds on the Kerch Peninsula. In November 2024, the Prosecutor’s Office of Crimea and Sevastopol stated that he was conducting illegal archaeological excavations at a Ukrainian cultural heritage site in Crimea.
Following the Russian occupation of the peninsula, as head of the Hermitage’s ‘Myrmekion Archaeological Expedition’, he illegally conducted excavations at the cultural heritage site — the ‘Ancient City of Myrmekion’ in Kerch — without permission from the competent Ukrainian authorities.
The Russian national has been notified of the charges under Part 4 of Article 298 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which carries a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment.
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