Activists toppled three statues of Communist leaders overnight Friday in Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, days after parliament passed a controversial bill designed to purge the country of Soviet-era symbols.
A video posted on YouTube by an anti-Russian militant group called "We've had enough" shows the masked men smashing three large monuments glorifying Bolshevik leaders in Ukraine's second largest city.
The men can be seen using a ladder to hook the statues with a cable tied to a white van that pulls away, bringing the statues down. In one instance, police officers look on without attempting to intervene.
Previous attempts to remove Soviet-era symbols have stoked tension in the mostly-Russian speaking city of 1.4 million, located some 200 kilometres from the conflict zone in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, where pro-Russian insurgents are fighting the Kiev government in a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people.
In February 2014, as protesters tore down dozens of statues of Lenin across Ukraine, scores of Kharkiv citizens formed a protective cordon around a statue of the former Soviet leader. It was eventually pulled down in September, in a move supported by local officials.
http://www.france24.com/en/20150411-statues-smashed-kharkiv-ukraine-soviet-past/
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