Kyiv removes monument symbolising friendship between Ukraine and Russia

(Patria) - Kyiv authorities began removing a Soviet-era monument marking the bond between Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday, more than two years after Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.

It will take several days to completely dismantle the red granite monument, which consists of about twenty individual elements, the city administration said.

It is actually a group of statues depicting Ukrainian Cossacks surrounding leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky and a Moscow ambassador. It sits beneath a steel installation shaped like an arch near the banks of the Dnipro River.

The statues, weighing between six and seven thousand tonnes, will be moved to an aviation museum.

The monument was built in 1982 to commemorate the "unification of the Ukrainian people with the fraternal Russian people" in 1654, when Khmelnytsky formed an alliance with the Russian tsar in the fight against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Soviet history books romanticised this as the beginning of an unbreakable friendship between Ukraine and Russia.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the Kyiv city council renamed the 35-metre steel arch above the statues.

The former "Arch of Friendship between Peoples" has been called the "Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People" since May 2022.

The authorities also removed two bronze figures beneath the arch in April 2022, which represented a Russian and a Ukrainian worker.