The Guardian Russia is to lift its blanket ban on returning thousands of precious works of art looted at the end of the second world war, in an overture by President Vladimir Putin's administration towards the west. Since the cold war ended a decade ago, Russia and Germany have been at loggerheads over the rightful ownership of the huge collections of art and cultural objects looted first by the Germans across Nazi-occupied Europe and then removed by the Red Army when the Russians sacked eastern Germany at the end of the war. The basements of museums and galleries across Russia today remain stuffed with the booty - estimated by German officials at more than 1m works of art and 2m books and other objects taken from Germany at the end of the war. Effectively the complex legal measures mean that items looted by the Nazis and then seized by the Soviet Union will qualify for restitution. Moscow insists that the German loot rightfully belongs to Russia as small compensation for the destruction wrought on the country by the Nazis.
Berlin argues that Russia is in breach of international law in keeping the treasure.
But despite the continuing ban on returning war booty to Germany, Russia and Germany are next week to trade 101 drawings and paintings for a fragment of the legendary 18th century Amber Room which disappeared from a St Petersburg palace in 1945. In a pioneering move, the Social Democratic mayor of Bremen, Henning Scherf, and Germany's arts minister, Michael Naumann, are to be given the pictures at a ceremony in Moscow next week, the first time since the war that Moscow has handed over war loot to Germany. In return the Russians will receive a commode and one of four mosaic panels that once graced the fabulous Amber Room at the imperial summer palace in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St Petersburg. The mosaic is the first fragment of the room to have surfaced since the war, despite constant treasure hunts for the mystery masterpiece during the last 50 years. The mosaic emerged in Bremen three years ago in the possession of an old-age pensioner whose father apparently stole it in 1945.