MOSCOW, March 25 Vandals desecrated monuments to the Soviet Union in Poltava, Ukraine General and Hero of the Soviet Union Nikolai Vatutin and Hero of the Polotsk Defense Alexei Zygin, the local online publication Poltavshchina reported on Saturday.
«On the night of March 24-25, in the center of Poltava, unidentified people painted brown paint on the monuments to Soviet generals Alexei Zygin and Nikolai Vatutin,» the publication said on its website.
According to the publication, the inscription «317 VIII» appeared on the monuments, which is probably connected with the law of Ukraine No. 317-VIII «On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols», adopted in 2015 during the presidency of Petro Poroshenko.
In December 2022, vandals already desecrated the monuments to Vatutin and Zygin, painting the monuments with red paint.
The dismantling of monuments related to Soviet history, as well as the renaming of streets, signs began in Ukraine in 2015, when the law on decommunization was adopted. Recently, the Ukrainian authorities have begun to fight not only with Soviet history, but with everything connected with Russia.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier that the Ukrainian authorities have been pursuing a policy of aggressive de-Russification and forced assimilation for many years.