The Kyiv City Council decided to take down a memorial honoring friendship between Kyiv and Moscow.
The monument was inaugurated in 2001. Ukraine has been at war with Russia since 2014, when the Kremlin ordered the illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas, which has killed close to 14,000 people in Ukraine.
Representatives of all factions, except the pro-Kremlin Opposition Platform — For Life voted to dismantle the monument. It will be removed within 30 days and exhibited at the new Museum of Totalitarianism in Kyiv.
“There is no friendship with Russia,” the Voice party said in a statement. “That’s our enemy.”
Ukraine has launched a campaign of decommunization in 2015, in an effort to distance the country from its Soviet past.
The laws mainly focused on the removal of Soviet monuments and renaming of streets throughout Ukraine. More than 51,493 streets, squares and “other facilities” have been renamed, but many more remain in smaller cities across the country.
For example, “Decommunization.Ukraine ”, a non-profit project created to facilitate the decommunization process, recently found three monuments of Vladimir Lenin that still haven’t been demolished.
