The campaign to ‘de-Russify’ Odesa

“de-Russification” once Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine comes to an end

From Odesa, Luke Harding reports on calls for a campaign of “de-Russification” once Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine comes to an end, Qazet.az reports according to TheGuardian.

Ukraine has already twice dismantled Soviet-era state symbols. In the 1990s many Lenin statues were removed, including those in Odesa. Kyiv’s parliament embarked on a further round of “decommunisation” in 2014 after the Maidan uprising against the country’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his war in the eastern Donbas region.

In Russian-occupied areas this process is going into reverse. In April Russian troops erected a new statue of Lenin outside the main administration building in the southern city of Henichesk, in Kherson province. They have torn down blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags from municipal buildings and hung Russian and Soviet ones in their place. This “re-Russification” is part of Putin’s attempt to erase Ukraine, Kyiv says.