The Kyiv mayor’s office began demolishing a Soviet-era monument celebrating the friendship between Russia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics that They have been at war since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
AFP journalists witnessed the collapse of the head of one of the two figures on the monument, which a crane was trying to remove. The statue represents a Russian worker and a Ukrainian worker who together carry a Soviet symbol in their hands where you can read “friendship between peoples”.
In Kyiv, several citizens removed a monument originally dedicated to the friendship between Ukraine and Russia. Now they have given it another meaning. Find out in this video.https://t.co/onJo5aoZtk
— CNN en Español (@CNNEE) April 24,
“The alleged ‘friendship between two peoples’”
“ Eight meters of metal from the supposed ‘friendship between two peoples’ dismantled. Is it symbolic (…) that the head of the Russian worker has collapsed? “, the mayor of the Ukrainian capital, Vitali Klitschko, wrote on Telegram.
Placed in Soviet times in 1982 to commemorate the “reunification of Russia and Ukraine”, the bronze monument will be completely dismantled this Tuesday, he added.
Klitschko justified this decision because Moscow wants to “destroy the state and the Ukrainians” with the invasion launched on 24 February.
Another monument will be dismantled in the future and the third, an arch, will be illuminated with Ukrainian flags and will be will change the name.
According to the mayor of kyiv, other monuments, bas-reliefs and symbols associated with the Soviet Union and Russia will soon be dismantled. More than 550 streets will also change their names.
For several years, Ukraine has carried out a policy of “decommunization”, for example, dismantling the statues of Lenin and changing the names of some cities to return them to those from before the revolution Bolshevik of 1917.
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