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Kyiv, Ukraine – With Russian troops looting Kherson and Moscow rushing in reinforcements before a looming battle for the strategic southern port, the city’s Kremlin-appointed proxy rulers dispatched a team to an imposing 18th-century stone cathedral on a special mission.

They were sent to steal the bones of Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin.

The memory of the eighteenth-century commander is vivid for those in the Kremlin bent on restoring the Russian Empire. It was Potemkin who convinced his lover, Catherine the Great, to annex Crimea in 1783, the founder of Kherson and Odessa sought to create “New Russia,” a dominion that extended across what is now southern Ukraine to the Black Sea and when President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February with the aim of Reclaiming part of a long-lost empire, summoned Potemkin’s vision.

Now, with Putin’s army failing to march on Odessa and threatening to be expelled from Kherson, Putin’s grand plans are in jeopardy – but the belief among Kremlin loyalists in what they see as Russia’s legitimate empire remains deep.

So a team of Kremlin loyalists descended into a crypt beneath a lone white marble tombstone inside St. Catherine’s Cathedral.

To get to Potemkin’s remains, they would open a magical door in the ground and climb up a narrow passage, according to people who visited the crypt. There they would find a simple wooden coffin on a raised platform, with one cross on it.

Under the lid of the coffin was a small black bag with the skull and bones of Potemkin, carefully numbered.

Russia’s designated Kherson region chief, Vladimir Saldo, said Potemkin’s remains have been moved to an undisclosed location east of the Dnipro River, where Russian forces may be preparing to retreat as Ukrainian forces approach the city.

“We took to the left bank the relics of the Holy Prince, which were in St. Catherine’s Cathedral,” Mr. Saldo said in an interview broadcast on Russian television. “We brought Potemkin himself.”

Local Ukrainian activists confirmed that the church was looted and that the bones were removed along with statues of revered Russian heroes.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Catherine the Great and Potemkin, said in an interview that shortly after its publication in 2000, the Kremlin called him to tell him how much Mr Putin liked his work. But Montefiore said Thursday that Mr. Putin’s reading of history was deeply flawed, and that his war had been reduced to the ruins of Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv that Potemkin and early Russian imperialists helped build. (The term “Potemkin Village” was coined to describe a splendid facade constructed to disguise an undesirable condition, though Mr. Montefiore says the term was incorrectly attributed to the prince, whose accomplishments in present-day Ukraine were real.)

“Potemkin would have despised Putin and everything he represented,” he said.

Mr. Montefiore added that the importance of bones for Russia highlighted “the strength of history and the strength of corpses”, especially for the Kremlin, which has built its case for war on a distorted version of history.

Kremlin loyalists made no effort to conceal the theft. “These were my decisions because these are my powers, my duties and my responsibilities,” Mr. Seldo said.