Cuba’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday said US claims that its troops were fighting in Ukraine were unfounded, and released for the first time information on legal proceedings against Cubans for mercenary activity in the war in Eastern Europe.

Communist Cuba has openly sided with its ally Russia in the conflict in Ukraine while also calling for peace talks.

Reports of Cubans on the battlefield first surfaced in 2023, resulting in an investigation in Cuba. Havana later stated that these Cubans were mercenaries.

“In the period from 2023 to 2025, nine criminal proceedings have been presented to the Cuban courts for the crime of mercenarism, against 40 defendants,” Saturday’s statement said.

“Trials have been held in eight cases, of which five resulted in convictions against 26 defendants, with sentences ranging from five to 14 years’ imprisonment. Three processes are pending the Court’s ruling, and one case is pending trial,” the foreign ministry said in the statement.

The United Nations is preparing to vote this month on a non-binding resolution calling on Washington to lift its decades-long embargo on Cuba. The resolution has been passed in the General Assembly with wide margins year after year since 1992.

The General Assembly adopted the resolution last year, with 187 countries voting in favor. The U.S. and Israel were the only countries that voted against it, while Moldova abstained.

A US State Department cable to diplomatic missions lobbying against the resolution states that Cuban soldiers are fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine.

“After North Korea, Cuba is the largest contributor of foreign troops to Russia’s aggression, with an estimated 1,000-5,000 Cubans fighting in Ukraine,” said the cable, which was first reported by Reuters on Monday.

The Cuban foreign ministry statement said “Cuba is not part of the armed conflict in Ukraine, nor does it participate with military personnel there, or in any other country.”

The ministry admitted it did not know how many nationals were involved on either side of the conflict, but said it had “a practice of zero tolerance for mercenarism, trafficking in persons and the participation of its nationals in any armed confrontation in another country.”

Dutch systems specialist Paul Post had glimpsed the notebooks that contained his father’s Nazi-era diaries before, but when he rediscovered them in an attic 15 years ago, the recent retiree finally had time to closely examine them.

Post, 74, had no idea that they would ultimately lead to Argentina, where in September the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official was charged with concealing an 18th-century painting looted during the Holocaust.

In his diaries, Post’s father described working in the Netherlands’ diamond bureau when it was taken over by the Nazis. As Post began researching the events, one name jumped out: the Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien.

Kadgien oversaw the Nazi looting of diamonds and gold from occupied countries. Post began to follow Kadgien’s wanderings after the war, hoping to solve the mystery of the diamonds that historians say are still missing. He learned by chance that Kadgien was believed to have also possessed looted art.

The hunt led him and Dutch journalists to the peaceful residential neighborhood home of Patricia Kadgien, 60, in the seaside town of Mar del Plata in Buenos Aires province, where “Portrait of a Lady” had been hanging prominently in her living room. The reporters spotted it in a real estate listing in August.

Her attorney, Carlos Murias, told Reuters that she did not know about claims the painting had been looted from the collection of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker and she has denied having hidden it.

Nazi-related discoveries like this occasionally pop up in Argentina, which after the war received both Holocaust survivors and dozens of Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. In February, President Javier Milei met with representatives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who asked for help accessing materials to investigate Nazi banking activities in Argentina. And last May, the Supreme Court announced it had found thousands of Nazi labor organization membership booklets in its basement archive.

Post’s unlikely role in the painting’s discovery underscores the complexities of finding Nazi-looted art today. An estimated 600,000 pieces were stolen from Jewish families, and more than 100,000 have never been returned.

“I’m just an amateur, I’m not a historian, nothing at all,” said Post. “I knew I was right on Kadgien.”

A FATHER’S WAR DIARIES RESURFACE

In 2010, Post’s family was cleaning out his mother’s house in Driehuis, a town just outside of Amsterdam. In the attic, they found three diaries written by his father, who died in 1976 at age 60.

In the diaries, Wim Post recounted how in 1942 the Nazis ordered the country’s diamond traders to turn over their precious stones, confiscating about 71,000 carats at the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange.

Paul Post, then recently retired from Hewlett-Packard, began visiting the Netherlands’ national archives to research the diamond confiscation. There he came across Kadgien’s name.

Shortly before Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Kadgien fled to Switzerland, where officials received a tip that he had carried out large transfers of diamonds, according to Regula Bochsler, a historian in Zurich. But in 1950, Kadgien received a visa to travel to Brazil, ultimately making his way to Buenos Aires.

Post reached out to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad to share his father’s account of the diamond raid, and in 2015, investigative reporter Cyril Rosman published a piece about the diaries. Post later published “The Diamond Heist,” a book on the subject.

In 2020, Post noticed that the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands listed Kadgien online as possibly having possessed “Portrait of a Lady” by the Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi — although art historians have said the painter was likely his contemporary Giacomo Ceruti — as well as an Abraham Mignon still life. He met with the agency’s researcher Perry Schrier, and told him he had tracked Kadgien’s family to Mar del Plata. But Schrier, who confirmed he had met with Post, couldn’t help him.

“I said, ‘I think I know the location, where it could be, and that is in Argentina,’” recalled Post. “But he said, ‘Yeah, ok, it could be possible, but how can we know that it is on the wall in their homes?’”

In June 2024, Post contacted Yael Weitz, an attorney for Goudstikker’s family. In an email exchange seen by Reuters, he offered to provide leads on the two missing paintings if she could provide him with information on Kadgien. She ultimately said that her team didn’t have anything to share.

Post then turned to journalists again. Last April, he reached out to Rosman with more information on Kadgien’s post-war travels. They had tried to contact Kadgien’s daughters in Argentina through the years and Rosman asked Peter Schouten, a freelance journalist in Buenos Aires, to try again.

“We were not looking for the paintings in particular,” said Rosman. “At that time we were mostly thinking about the diamonds that were looted, so we wanted to know what happened to that.”

When Schouten rang the bell at Patricia Kadgien’s home in August, there was no answer. But he saw a for-sale sign in her yard. The reporters checked the real-estate listing and spotted the painting in one of the photos of the property. They could barely believe their luck.

“I thought, ok, is it really this simple, a picture that’s missing for 80 years is here above a couch in the living room?” said Rosman.

The day after they published a story on the painting’s discovery, police raided the home. But in the painting’s place was a tapestry of horses. Eight days later, Kadgien’s attorney handed the painting over to authorities.

Federal prosecutors have charged Patricia Kadgien, who runs a small clothing business, and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, a go-kart mechanic, with aggravated concealment and are investigating more than 20 drawings and prints, as well as two portraits, also seized from their home and from the home of Patricia’s sister in Mar del Plata.

“The attitude was to hide the painting,” the case’s prosecutor, Carlos Martinez, told Reuters. “We think that isn’t indicative of someone that doesn’t know what they have.”

COMPETING CLAIMS TO THE PAINTING

Goudstikker’s family have fought for decades to get his paintings back.

The art collector died when he fell into the hold of a boat as he was fleeing the advancing Nazis with his family in May 1940. But in a small black book, he had listed “Portrait of a Lady” along with more than 1,000 pieces in his collection.

In what historians describe as a forced sale after his death, top Nazi official Hermann Goering purchased about 800 of Goudstikker’s paintings. Weitz, the attorney who represents Goudstikker’s family, said that Goering’s associate, Alois Miedl, sold “Portrait of a Lady” to Kadgien in 1944.

The family has recovered 300 to 350 works of art, including 200 that had been mostly hanging in museums that the Netherlands agreed to return in 2006.

Charlene von Saher, Goudstikker’s granddaughter who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, said her family informed the Kadgiens of their claim to “Portrait of a Lady” after the journalists published their story. Paolo Plebani, curator at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, said it is worth upwards of $100,000, but attorneys for the Goudstikker family said it is impossible to determine the value before examining the condition and confirming the artist’s identity.

“I just hope that they would be people who would feel like doing the right thing and correcting a historical injustice,” von Saher told Reuters, saying that the discovery was “like a movie.”

But Patricia Kadgien hasn’t relented. She has filed a claim in civil court that says her father’s sister-in-law bought the painting from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in 1943. It said the painting was “legitimately possessed” by her father and that she inherited it after he died. The museum told Reuters the painting was never part of its collection.

The claim said that she removed the painting from her home “for security reasons,” thinking she was the victim of “a virtual scam” when she started receiving calls from a journalist in August.

As for Post, he still wants to know what happened to the diamonds that were tied to Kadgien. Martinez, the prosecutor, said authorities did not find jewels of value or from the war-period in the Mar del Plata home.

Saskia Coenen Snyder, a Dutch professor of modern Jewish history at the University of South Carolina, said it is very hard to prove that Nazis took diamonds with them to South America. “I’ll give him credit for at least spending years of his time pursuing, uncovering stories and truths that not everybody wants to do or has been able to,” she said of Post. “He’s a bit of a pit bull.”

Thousands of Palestinians streamed north along the coast of Gaza on Saturday, trekking by foot, car and cart back to their abandoned homes as a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian terrorist group Hamas appeared to be holding.

Israeli troops pulled back under the first phase of a US-brokered agreement reached this week to end the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left much of the enclave in ruins.

“It is an indescribable feeling; praise be to God,” said Nabila Basal as she traveled by foot with her daughter, who she said had suffered a head wound in the war. “We are very, very happy that the war has stopped, and the suffering has ended.”

US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Gaza early Saturday to observe the Israeli military redeployment, Israeli Army Radio reported, citing a security source.

He was joined by the head of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral Brad Cooper, who said in a statement that his visit was part of the establishment of a task force that would support stabilization efforts in Gaza, though US troops would not be deployed inside the enclave.

CLOCK TICKING ON RELEASE OF HOSTAGES

Once the Israeli forces had completed their redeployment on Friday, which keeps them out of major urban areas but still in control of roughly half the enclave, the clock began ticking for Hamas to release its hostages within 72 hours.

“We are very excited, waiting for our son and for all the 48 hostages,” said Hagai Angrest, whose son Matan is among the 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be alive. “We are waiting for the phone call.”

Twenty-six hostages have been declared dead in absentia and the fate of two more is unknown.

According to the agreement, after the hostages are handed over, Israel will free 250 Palestinians serving long sentences in its prisons and 1,700 detainees captured during the war.

Hundreds of trucks per day are expected to surge into Gaza carrying food and medical aid, according to the agreement.

TRUMP EXPECTED TO TRAVEL TO ISRAEL AND EGYPT

But questions remain about whether the ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange deal, the biggest step yet towards ending two years of war, will lead to a lasting peace under Trump’s 20-point plan.

Much could still go wrong. Further steps in Trump’s plan have yet to be agreed. These include how the demolished Gaza Strip is to be ruled when fighting ends, and the ultimate fate of Hamas, which has rejected Israel’s demands it disarm.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump expressed confidence the ceasefire would hold, saying: “They’re all tired of the fighting.” He said he believed there was a “consensus” on the next steps but acknowledged some details still have to be worked out.

During the Hamas attack on Israeli communities, military bases and a music festival on October 7, 2023, terrorists killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and captured 251 hostages.

Trump is expected to visit the region on Monday and address the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the first US president to do so since George W. Bush in 2008.

Trump said he would also travel to Egypt and that other world leaders were expected to be present.