Another step toward ending WWII.

A senior Russian official has angered the country’s nationalists by announcing that Moscow is close to agreeing the return of art “appropriated” by the Red Army during the Second World War to eight different European countries.

Mr Anatoly Vilkov, deputy head of the department responsible for protecting Russia’s cultural heritage, said Moscow had already satisfied many of the claims, was actively considering others and had agreed to look at requests that had been hitherto ignored.

“The claims came from Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ukraine,” he told Interfax.

Controversially Mr Vilkov said that Russia had agreed to return a collection of paintings to the Netherlands which are currently housed in Moscow’s Pushkin Fine Arts Museum.

The collection is reported to include canvasses by Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Rubens and Tintoretto and is valued at up to half a billion dollars. Hungary is to receive a set of extremely rare fifteenth century religious publications and Ukraine four twelfth century church frescoes currently on display at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

He also signalled that Moscow was considering other claims and was willing to be reasonable.

Austria wants 649 fragments of Persian documents taken from the Austrian National Library, Belgium the restitution of forty archives, Greece the return of archives belonging to the Jewish community in Thessaloniki and Luxembourg some archives relating to the Masonic Movement.

Mr Vilkov also made an offer to Germany to return a rare Gutenberg bible estimated to be worth up to $20 million. “If they (the Germans) offer us something of equal historical or artistic value we’ll be happy to exchange it,” he said.

Russia is estimated to be storing 260,000 pieces of “trophy art” acquired by the Red Army, including three million archive items and 1.5 million books.

Some of the disputed items were originally housed in Hitler’s personal museum which was thoroughly emptied by the Soviet Army.

Any moves to return such art remain deeply controversial in Russia, however, where the older generation and Russian nationalists still harbour bitter memories of the terrible physical and moral damage inflicted by the German army, not to mention the huge loss of life.

And the two things are related how? It is time for Russia to put the eighteenth century behind her and take her rightful place among the nations of Christendom.