U.S. Customs and Border Protection Stops Import

Two swords and a sabre

CBP at JFK Returns Cultural Artifacts to Ukraine Release Date Fri, 03/10/2023 - 12:00

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the Port of John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) International Mail Facility, with the help from officers at the National Targeting Center, Antiquities Unit seized a stone axe head and three metal swords on September 2, 2022. The three metals swords arrived from Russia and the stone axe head arrived from the (sic) Ukraine. The items were identified as Ukrainian culture property by representatives from the Ukrainian government.

"The Ukraine? The Ukraine of what?

The periodical 'Foreign Policy' (Amy Mackinnon "Ukraine’s Newest Weapons Shipment Is From 300 B.C.", March 10, 2023) also gets it wrong:

On Friday morning, three swords that looked to have spent a good bit of their lives underground were laid carefully on a green cloth draped over a table at the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. For more than a year now, Washington has been singularly preoccupied with getting weapons to Ukraine. So when an invitation arrived from the Ukrainian Embassy to a repatriation ceremony for a stone axe and three swords, I was naturally intrigued. The weapons presented at the embassy were purloined artifacts sent from Russia, seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport. Experts from the Institute of Archaeology at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences have dated the swords to the fifth or sixth century B.C. and the polished flint axe head to the third century B.C. All have been deemed to hail from territory belonging to present-day Ukraine, according to a handout shared by the embassy.

The axe would be third millennium BC.