Specialists will dismantle Soviet symbols from the Motherland sculpture in Kyiv this year, Volodymyr Viatrovych, the head of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute, has said.
“It’s hard for me to say when precisely. This decision has not been made on the engineering level yet. But I am confident that the dismantling will definitely happen. And it should happen in 2016,” the Internet publication 44.ua quoted Viatrovych as saying on Friday.
On January 20, 2016, Viatrovych said the USSR emblem will be removed from the shield.
“The emblem of the USSR will be removed from the shield of the Motherland sculpture,” Viatrovych said on Facebook.
The Motherland sculpture is located in Kyiv on the high right bank of the Dnipro River. The statue is holding a 16 meters long sward, which weighs nine tonnes, in one hand and a shield, which is 13 meters long and 8 meters wide and bears the emblem of the USSR (which weighs 13 tonnes), in the other hand.
The monument belongs to the Museum of Ukrainian History in WW II.
The complex was opened by Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on the Victory Day in 1981.
