A botched attempt to steal a bronze statue of Russia’s Peter the Great, given to the U.K. by Vladimir Putin’s government in an era of warmer relations between the two states, has left a “diplomatically awkward repair bill of thousands of pounds,” The Guardian reports. The statue, which Putin himself admired on a trip to London in 2003, is by Mihail Chemiakin, reputedly one of Putin’s favored artists. It was inspired by a 1698 trip by Peter to the London suburb of Deptford, where it now stands, to study British shipbuilding techniques. Now a fight has broken out about who should fix the statue after masked raiders wielding angle grinders failed to remove it. Greenwich council told the Guardian it “was the responsibility of the developer, Fairview Homes,” but a manager at Millennium Quay, the Deptford housing estate subsequently built around the statue, said: “We can get it restored if we can find out who owns it. In the last resort, I’ll call the Russians. As it was a gift from the Russian people, we can see if the Russian embassy will pay for it.”