Russia has threatened to cut off museum exchanges with the Netherlands if it upholds a decision to give Ukraine ancient gold artefacts left in limbo when Russia annexed Crimea.

Speaking with state news agency RIA Novosti on Thursday, culture minister Vladimir Medinsky said a 2016 court decision to hand over more than 2,000 Crimean artefacts to Kiev was “absolutely politicised” and “destroys the system of exchanging exhibits”. Russia has appealed the ruling.

“This can be compared only with the plundering of museums during Napoleon's Italian campaigns or the fascist aggression” of the Second World War, Mr Medinsky said.

“If this ruling comes into force, I won't have the right to sanction any exhibits on the territory of a country where a most dangerous precedent of seizing cultural treasures is being created,” he added.

Four Crimean museums lent 2,111 invaluable cultural artefacts created by the Scythians, a race of nomadic horse warriors who dominated the Eurasian steppe in the centuries before Christ, to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam in February 2014.

But the future of these showpieces in the museum's Crimea - Gold and Mysteries of the Black Sea exhibit came into question when Russia took over the peninsula in the following weeks.