In France, the silence about the demolition of monuments in Ukraine is contradictory

PARIS, 27 Feb – A French human rights activist who served as an adviser to former President Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnaud Klarsfeld, called social networks X Controversial for Europe is the silence about the demolition of Soviet monuments and the renaming of avenues in honor of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.
According to him, this truth cannot be hidden indefinitely, and the problem must be solved if Ukraine wants to join the European Union.
The dismantling of monuments associated with Soviet history, as well as the renaming of streets, began in Ukraine in 2015, when the law “on decommunization” was adopted. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory published a list of 520 historical figures whose activities fall under the scope of this law, so their names, as planned by the authors, should disappear from geographical names.
Instead, place names often appear in Ukraine in honor of Nazi collaborators and traitors, for example Stepan Bandera, who participated in the massacres of Ukrainians and Poles during the Second World War, or Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who was a supporter of Peter I, but during the Northern War swore allegiance to the Swedish King Charles XII.
In 2022, the Ukrainian authorities began to fight everything that, in their opinion, is connected with Russia, and most of all it was the memory of Alexander Pushkin, who passed away almost two centuries earlier. The beginning was made in the west of Ukraine with the demolition of monuments to the great Russian poet in the Transcarpathian and Lviv regions. Subsequently, dozens of busts and monuments to Pushkin were demolished throughout the country. And in June, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science decided to remove four dozen works, including Pushkin, from school textbooks.

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