In a symbolic protest against Moscow’s influence and power, protesters in Kiev tore down a statue of Vladimir Lenin on Sunday. The statue was then dismantled with hammers and chisels on the ground.
Protests in the Ukrainian capital, dubbed the “Euromaidan”, continue to escalate, with thousands of people taking to the streets to demonstrate their displeasure with the government’s move to pull out of a deal that would have brought them closer with the EU, and instead looked towards Moscow.
Opposition leaders have called on protesters to continue with applying pressure on the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to dismiss his government and resign, with the current protests the largest since 2004. However, whilst some opposition groups such as the Svoboda Party have advocated tearing down monuments to the Soviet past, others such as Mustafa Nayyem have commented that such acts are vandalism and easier than dismantling the monument in a legitimate way.
Some Russian opposition commentators, such as Tikhon Dziadko of Rain TV, have compared the destruction of the statue of Lenin with the toppling of the statue of Soviet KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky in 1991 which led to the Russian attempted putsch.
