Kyiv tears down monument to Russian friendship

The site of the statue has in fact several monuments all meant to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of Kyiv and to celebrate the friendship between Ukrainians and Russians. On the Friendship of Peoples arch, activists in 2018 painted a crack to draw attention to Ukrainians imprisoned in Russia and Crimea.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko told the journalists present that they had started removing Russian symbols from the city. "You don't kill your brother. You don't rape your sister. You don't destroy your friend's country. That’s why, today, we have dismantled this monument," he said.

The statue, which has now been demolished, was a 6-meter-high bronze sculpture depicting a Russian and a Ukrainian worker holding the ribbon of Soviet friendship to commemorate the "reunification" between Russia and Ukraine.

Architect Serhii Myrhorodskyi had designed the statue which was put up in 1982. Now, the 86-year-old thinks that tearing it down was "the right thing to do. There is no friendship with Russia and there won't be for a long time as long as Putin and his gang are in this world."

During the demolition of the statues, one of the two heads broke off and fell. The workers initially had difficulties taking the huge statues down, Klitschko explained afterwards. But eventually they succeeded and "in that same way, we have to pick up and expel the enemy and the Russian occupier from our land."

As a crane lifted the monument to take it down, a crowd of about 100 people cheered, shouting, "glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, glory to the Ukrainian people." Elsewhere in Ukraine, de-Russification is also going ahead, with Soviet monuments being dismantled and streets and squares named after Russian figures being renamed.

Kyiv is about to rename around 60 streets or places. A subway station named after Leo Tolstoy would also be affected. For some though, that's going too far. "Only idiots could do this," Kyiv resident Ihor Serhiivych told the Guardian. "If it was a Putin statue I would understand, but you have to differentiate between enemies and world-famous literature."