Ukrainian museum defaces war memorial (IMAGES)

A Ukrainian World War II museum has defaced memorials to Soviet cities which demonstrated resolve in fighting off Nazi invaders. The move was touted as helping to deconstruct “Communist myths”.

The USSR declared a number of cities 'heroic' for the role that their citizens played in the fight against the Axis powers during WWII. Kiev was one of the recipients and has a memorial street in which each city was commemorated on a separate granite stone marked with its name and a bas-relief of the gold star of the hero of the Soviet Union award – the highest state decoration at the time.

On Friday, the national War Museum in Kiev, which has custody of the street, claimed it removed all letters and images from the stones, in “a very important symbolic step.” The names of all of hero cities, including Kiev and others in modern Ukraine, were erased, judging by a video from the scene.

Calling cities heroic was “one of the foundational myths of the totalitarian Soviet regime” it claimed. In 2022 Kiev restored the honor and bestowed it on cities for the role they have played in the ongoing conflict with Russia.

©  National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War

In August 2023, Ukrainian officials had the Soviet coat of arms removed from the iconic WWII Motherland Monument in Kiev. It was replaced with Ukraine’s current national symbol, the trident.

Kiev declared “decommunisation” a priority policy after the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014. In practice, officials have targeted Russian cultural heritage, including sites that predate the USSR, such as the city of Odessa. In early December, the city's council announced a decision to remove a bust of the poet Alexander Pushkin, a UNESCO-protected piece of art built in the 1880s.

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The War Museum’s goal is to revise the history of WWII, Director Yury Savchuk said last month on the occasion of the institution’s 50th anniversary. It wants to create a permanent exhibition “telling about the centuries of the Ukrainian fight for independence” – primarily during the two world wars, he said.

Western Ukrainian nationalist forces allied with the Nazis during World War II expected the Third Reich to help them create a Ukrainian state. In practice, the Germans used them as auxiliary occupational forces, including to perpetrate massacres of Jews, Poles and Soviet sympathizers in the captured territories. Today, Ukraine honors those people as freedom fighters and national heroes.

In an interview this week, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the Ukrainian policies since 2014 “absolutely racist” and aimed at the full eradication of anything Russian, including the language. The discrimination is one of the core causes of the ongoing military conflict between the two nations, he said.