It was located in Stari Troyany in the south of the country. From now on, the monuments to the controversial leader remain only in Crimea and self-recognised republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, i.e. occupied Ukrainian territories.
“While we were sleeping, some unknown Messers demolished the last monument to the red invader Lenin in Ukraine (except for the occupied territories and museums / factories). It had been hiding from the watchful eye of the decommunisers in the village of Stari Troyany, Izmail district, Odesa region,” activist Serhiy Sternenko said on Facebook on Wednesday morning.
Ukrainian protesters started pulling down the statues of the Bolshevik leader and Soviet state founder in Kyiv and other cities as far back as December, 2013 in the wake of the then president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The protests had an anti-Russian component, since the Kremlin aimed at derailing the EU-Ukraine deal and threatened with trade retaliation.
In May 2015, the decommunisation laws in Ukraine came into force, which contributed to the so-called Leninfall, the mass toppling of Lenin statues throughout the country. Ukrainian MPs outlaweded Soviet symbols, condemned the Communist regime, opened the archives of the Soviet secret services. In July 2017, the Constitutional Court declared constitutional the Law on Condemning Communist and National-Socialist Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and a ban on promoting their symbols, which ultimately put Nazis and Communists on equal footing in the country.
