Paintings that Ukraine sent to Poland to save from Russian bombs may not come home. The heirs of Polish prince Andrzej Lubomirski are going to court to prevent the return of two paintings from the Lviv Historical Museum's collection to Ukraine, which were taken to Poland at the start of the full-scale invasion, Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita reported.
The dispute turns a wartime rescue into a legal trap. The two works are a 16th-century "Portrait of Roksolana" and "Portrait of a Young Man" by the artist Aloys Reichan, now held at the Museum of Central Pomerania in Słupsk. They were brought to Poland as part of efforts to safeguard Ukrainian museum collections threatened by the war, and were shown in an exhibition of treasures from the Lviv Historical Museum.
A lawyer for the Lubomirski heirs, Maciej Obrębski, has asked the Słupsk district court to bar the paintings' transfer until a court case concludes, arguing the heirs believe the works belonged to the Lubomirski collection and must stay in Poland. The Lviv Historical Museum holds the opposite position: the paintings are part of Ukraine's state museum fund and were removed to Poland only temporarily, for safekeeping during the war.
The rescue is the reason the paintings are at risk
The paintings are in Poland for the same reason Ukraine has been moving its cultural heritage across the country and abroad throughout the war: to keep it from Russian destruction. Ukraine has evacuated collections, dismantled monuments, and shipped artworks out of harm's way from Kramatorsk to Kherson, and sent works abroad for exhibition and protection.
The exhibition organizers framed the loan in exactly those terms.
"The exhibits were brought to Poland as part of efforts to ensure the preservation of Ukrainian museum collections threatened by the ongoing war. The presence of the collection in Poland guarantees its safety," they wrote of the show, "The Borderlands of Europe — from the Treasury of the Lviv Historical Museum".
The irony is sharp. Works sent to Poland precisely because Poland was safe are now the ones Ukraine may struggle to bring back, caught not by Russian shelling but by a Polish ownership claim in a Polish court.
Ukraine has been here before, in 2024
This is not the first time a wartime loan to Poland has drawn an ownership claim, and the earlier case shows how Ukraine responded. A similar situation arose in 2024 during an exhibition at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
Then, after an analogous motion was filed, Ukraine removed the disputed exhibits back to Lviv ahead of schedule, and the court later refused to apply the requested protective measures.
The Lubomirskis are an old aristocratic house with claims across the border
The claim reaches back into the shared history that makes Polish-Ukrainian heritage disputes so tangled. The Lubomirskis were an influential princely family of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, holding large estates across what is now both Poland and Ukraine, and their members were patrons, politicians, soldiers, and collectors, according to Zahid.NET.
In 1823, Henryk Lubomirski transferred his vast art collection to the Ossolineum institution in Lviv, and the Museum of the Lubomirski Princes was created on its basis as a separate part of the Ossolineum. That entangled history is the root of the present claim: collections assembled by Polish aristocrats in a city that was then part of Poland and is now part of Ukraine, whose ownership the two countries' institutions and heirs can read in very different ways.
The case sits against the backdrop of a fraught moment in Polish-Ukrainian relations, strained this year by disputes over historical memory.
