00:00 This was the most important and most visible signs of Russian influence in Ukraine.
00:05 But now, the references to Russian influence are gone after Ukraine purged one of its tallest
00:11 statues.
00:12 The towering Mother Ukraine statue in Kiev, one of the nation's most recognizable landmarks,
00:17 lost its hammer and sickle symbol yesterday as officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem
00:23 with Ukraine's strident coat of arms.
00:25 The figure held a sword in her right hand and a shield in her left.
00:29 Originally, the shield bore the Soviet Union's coat of arms, a crossed hammer and sickle
00:34 surrounded by years of wheat.
00:36 But now, the Soviet Union's coat of arms has been replaced with Ukrainian's.
00:41 Erected in 1981 as part of a larger complex housing the National World War II Museum,
00:47 the 61-meter Mother Ukraine monument stands on the right bank of the Dnieper River in
00:52 Kiev facing eastward towards Moscow.
00:55 Created in the image of a fearless female warrior, the statue holds a sword and a shield.
01:00 But now, instead of the hammer and sickle emblem, the shield features the Ukrainian
01:05 trident that was adopted as the coat of arms of independent Ukraine on 19 February 1992.
01:12 Workers had begun removing the old emblem in late July, but poor weather and ongoing
01:17 air raids had delayed the work.
01:18 The completed sculpture will be officially unveiled on August 24, on Ukraine's Independence
01:24 Day.
01:25 The new stamp also coincides with a new name for the statue, which was previously known
01:28 as the Motherland Monument when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
01:33 The change is just one part of a long effort in Ukraine to erase the vestiges of Soviet
01:38 and Russian influence from its public spaces, often by removing monuments and renaming streets
01:43 to honour Ukrainian artists, poets and soldiers instead of Russian cultural figures.
01:49 Most Soviet and Communist Party symbols were outlawed in Ukraine in 2015, but that did
01:54 not include World War II monuments such as the Mother Ukraine statue.
01:58 For many in Ukraine, the Soviet past is synonymous with Russian imperialism, the oppression of
02:03 the Ukrainian language and the Holodomor, a man-made famine under Joseph Stalin that
02:09 killed millions of Ukrainians and has since been recognised as an act of genocide by both
02:14 the European Parliament and the United States.
02:18 The movement away from Soviet symbols has accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion
02:22 of Ukraine, where assertions of national identity have become an important show of unity as
02:28 the country struggles under the horror of war.
02:32 Across Ukraine, hundreds of statues of Russian poets and Soviet generals were torn down or
02:36 defaced and public art and propaganda murals were covered up or removed.
02:41 Thousands of streets and dozens of towns and villages were renamed.
02:45 Streets and squares previously named after Soviet Party leaders or generals were given
02:49 names associated with national history or prominent Ukrainians.
02:55 The move has its roots in a movement to decommunise or shed memories of the former Soviet Union,
03:01 which Ukraine has stepped up since Russia's fallout invasion last year.
03:05 That cultural shift to a stronger Ukrainian self-identity was accompanied in recent years
03:10 by a political tilt to the West that infuriated Vladimir Putin and was part of his justification
03:15 for invading Ukraine.
03:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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