Russia is to lift its blanket ban on returning thousands of precious works of art looted at the end of the second world war, in an overture by President Vladimir Putin's administration towards the west.
But while the bill, expected to be passed by the Russian parliament next week, will please the country's wartime allies and help to overcome years of rancour over the "trophy art" controversy, it will leave Germany angry at being exempted from the list of potential beneficiaries.
Since the cold war ended a decade ago, Russia and Germany have been at loggerheads over the rightful ownership of the huge collections of art and cultural objects looted first by the Germans across Nazi-occupied Europe and then removed by the Red Army when the Russians sacked eastern Germany at the end of the war.
The basements of museums and galleries across Russia today remain stuffed with the booty - estimated by German officials at more than 1m works of art and 2m books and other objects taken from Germany at the end of the war. The lower house in Moscow, the Duma, is expected to amend the trophy art legislation next week, making it possible for works of art held by Russia to be returned to their owners abroad, provided they were not among the "aggressor states" of axis powers.
Effectively the complex legal measures mean that items looted by the Nazis and then seized by the Soviet Union will qualify for restitution. Moscow insists that the German loot rightfully belongs to Russia as small compensation for the destruction wrought on the country by the Nazis. Berlin argues that Russia is in breach of international law in keeping the treasure.
But despite the continuing ban on returning war booty to Germany, Russia and Germany are next week to trade 101 drawings and paintings for a fragment of the legendary 18th century Amber Room which disappeared from a St Petersburg palace in 1945.
The pictures, currently under guard at the German embassy in Moscow, include works by Albrecht Dürer and Toulouse Lautrec originally in the collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle in northern Germany. In a pioneering move, the Social Democratic mayor of Bremen, Henning Scherf, and Germany's arts minister, Michael Naumann, are to be given the pictures at a ceremony in Moscow next week, the first time since the war that Moscow has handed over war loot to Germany.
In return the Russians will receive a commode and one of four mosaic panels that once graced the fabulous Amber Room at the imperial summer palace in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St Petersburg.
The mosaic is the first fragment of the room to have surfaced since the war, despite constant treasure hunts for the mystery masterpiece during the last 50 years. The mosaic emerged in Bremen three years ago in the possession of an old-age pensioner whose father apparently stole it in 1945.
Built at the beginning of the 18th century in what was east Prussia and is now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, the Amber Room, a study entirely clad in highly carved honey-coloured amber, was a present to Peter the Great of Russia from King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia to seal the two monarchs' pact against Sweden.
The Russian ruler's daughter, Elizabeth, had the amber cladding installed at the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, where it remained for almost two centuries until the Nazis dismantled it in 1943 and returned it to Königsberg.
When the Red Army seized the enclave in 1945, Hitler had the chamber stripped and the amber packed into crates. It then disappeared without trace until the mosaic surfaced in 1997. Intriguingly, the Amber Room has never been found, baffling experts and fortune-seekers and spawning countless treasure hunts and false alarms.
The Germans are returning the mosaic and the chest of drawers next week in the hope that the gesture will hasten the return of hundreds of thousands of books, coins and paintings looted from Nazi Germany, including an original Gutenberg bible, and the fabled Schliemann collection of gold from ancient Troy.
The Russians say they are making an exception in returning the 101 pictures to Bremen because they were stolen by an individual and not removed by Stalin's official teams of art-robbers.
The changes to the law should end a decade of confrontation between the Kremlin and the parliament about trophy art, and are the latest evidence that President-elect Putin is in for a much easier ride with the Duma than was his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
For years, the Duma defied Mr Yeltsin's attempts to be more conciliatory on the war loot, causing Mr Yeltsin to go to the constitutional court last summer to have the art treasures law amended.
Mr Putin is to visit Germany on June 15-16 for his first meeting with the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.