Teens Who Defaced Memorial Plaque in Kyiv May Be Released
The police received a call, saying that 14 masked men, using sledgehammers and pincers, were chipping off a concrete memorial plaque on the facade of a building on Zhukov Street in Kyiv.
Law enforcement officers discovered the damaged plaque at the scene. Young people fled before the arrival of the investigation group.
Information about the young people, along with their descriptions, was shared among police patrols and soon all the participants of the incident were taken into custody at the local police department to establish all the circumstances.
The group’s members were all students between the ages of 14 and 18 from Kyiv and the Kyiv region.
Verkhovna Rada lawmaker and far-right activist Ihor Mosiychuk, who had been arrested for his participation in a plot to blow up a Lenin statue in 2011 but was released following the country’s February 2014 Euromaidan coup, stated on his Facebook page that he “gave a lecture on decommunisation” to the police officers, who had detained the group of teenagers who had desecrated the memorial to Zhukov.
Earlier this week the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed several decommunisation laws banning Soviet symbols, which denounced the Communist regime [of 1917-1991] and allowed access to the classified archives of the Soviet secret services and recognized members of UPA and other nationalist organizations as fighters for Ukraine’s independence.