«Today the city council decided to decommunize the name of the Arch of Friendship of Peoples. From now on it will be the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People», announced on Telegram messaging the mayor of the capital. , Vitali Klitschko.
The elected municipal officials have also «approved a list of more than 40 monuments and memorial emblems which must be removed from the streets and buildings of the capital to be transmitted to the museum of totalitarianism», he added.
If many places or monuments are to be renamed, Vitali Klitschko indicated that the process of naming new names would take time and would involve «specialists», in particular historians, «so as not to take a hasty decision».
The Arch of Friendship of Peoples is an imposing metal arch with a height of 35 meters erected in a park in the city center in 1982. It was part of the same complex as the sculpture of the two Russian and Ukrainian workers dismantled the month latest.
In 2018, anti-Russian activists put a trompe-l’oeil sticker on it, showing a crack in the center of the arch to underline the breakdown in relations between the two countries.
Many residents in kyiv are calling for the renaming of other symbols whose names are linked to Russia or Belarus, its ally.
The kyiv metro thus organized an online consultation during which voters voted to rename «Warsaw» the «Minsk» station, «Boutcha» the «Beresteïska» station, the Belarusian city of Brest, or even the name of the dissident poet Ukrainian Vassyl Stous, died in the gulag, the station «Leon-Tolstoy Square».
