In one of the more bizarre incidents in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its eighth month, a team of Russians has plundered the remains of Grigory Potemkin from his grave at Kherson, where a major battle looms between Russian and Ukrainian forces. 

An 18th-century Russian prince and paramour of Catherine the Great, Potemkin helped found the cities of Kherson and Odessa and is regarded as a national hero in Russia. The unseemly pilfering of his bones from a crypt in the heart of Kherson underlines how thin a hold Russian forces have on a region that Vladimir Putin recently annexed illegally to boost the Russian Federation.

The Moscow-appointed proxy head of occupied Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, told a local Russian-installed television station: “We transported to the left bank [of the Dnieper River] the remains of the holy prince that were stored in  St. Catherine’s Cathedral … we took Potemkin himself.” He added that a monument to Potemkin and monuments to a number of Russian generals were taken, too. Mr. Saldo somewhat oddly referred to the plunder as “sanctuaries which must be preserved,” and with respect to Potemkin added that in the future “we will bring him and all the relics back to where they belong.”

As the man who convinced Catherine the Great to annex Crimea in 1783, prior to which the peninsula belonged to a Turkic khanate, Potemkin looms large in Russia’s historical consciousness. According to the New York Times, “when President Vladimir V. Putin invaded Ukraine in February with the goal of restoring part of a long-lost empire, he invoked Potemkin’s vision” of a “New Russia” that would encompass virtually all of southern Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. 

The Times reported that Potemkin’s skull and bones were contained in a small black bag under the lid of a coffin concealed behind a trapdoor beneath the 18th-century stone cathedral, and sagely noted that “the plundering of Potemkin’s grave is of a piece with Russia’s efforts to obliterate Ukrainian identity.” 

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of a book about Catherine the Great and Potemkin, asked in a tweet, “So what will Putin do with the stolen body of Prince Potemkin of Taurida? Though Potemkin would have loathed Putin’s primitive cruel nationalism, I predict a plangent imperial TV extravaganza when Putin will bury Potemkin in a flashy new Moscow tomb and promote his war.”

Ukrainska Pravda reported that Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, “jokingly thanked” the Russians for their help in the “de-Russification of Ukraine” by looting monuments to Russian generals. 

Whether the order to grab Potemkin’s bones came from the Kremlin or was a ghoulish initiative taken by Mr. Saldo himself was not immediately clear. The theft at Kherson could presage more mayhem to come, though, particularly as Ukraine prepares to deliver some heavy counterpunches to the Russians who are still entrenched at the strategic southern port city. The AP reported on Friday that Ukrainian forces were surrounding Kherson from the west and attacking Russia’s foothold on the west bank of the Dnieper River.  

Mr.  Saldo said on Thursday that  more than 70,000 Kherson residents have already fled the city. There have also been reports of Russian forces transferring an unspecified number of their soldiers and weaponry to the western side of the Dnieper in anticipation of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, but not everybody believes them. President Zelensky told Italy’s Corriere della Sera,  “I don’t see them fleeing from Kherson,” adding, “this is an information attack, so that we go there, transfer troops from other dangerous directions there.”

The actual state of play of Russian forces in the region is less clear. Reuters reported that Ukrainian forces have said that the Russians are digging in to defend Kherson, and that claim dovetails with the latest assessment from the British ministry of defense that Russian forces are “currently only capable of defensive operations” in Ukraine — and that includes the regions they occupy illegally. For now, anyway.