KIEV, February 8. /TASS/. A group of vandals broke into the Visual Culture Research Center in Kiev and destroyed art objects of the The Lost Opportunity exhibition that explored negative effects of the 2014 state coup in Ukraine, the Public Radio reported.
More than a dozen of masked men broke into the center, which housed a solo exhibition by left-wing activist and artist David Chichkan. They beat up a security guard and destroyed the exhibition almost completely.
"They destroyed all works. They even destroyed our heater. We called the police, but it arrived only half an hour later," a center employee was quoted as saying.
Chichkan, a Kiev-based artist known for his anarchist and communist views, lives and works in Kiev. His solo exhibition, The Lost Opportunity, was intended to look into the consequences of the 2014 coup, which the author describes as "a lost opportunity for the Ukrainian society to accomplish a social revolution."
According to media reports, Chichkan’s exhibitions have been attacked by radicals before.
Protests in Kiev’s central Maidan Nezaleznosti, or Independence Square, broke out in late 2013, when then President Viktor Yanukovich put off signing an association agreement with the European Union in order to examine the deal more thoroughly. This move sparked mass riots, known as Euromaidan, that eventually led to a coup in February 2014, ousting Yanukovich from the presidency and forcing him to flee from Ukraine.
During the standoff in Kiev, radicals placed a tent camp in the Independence Square, seized a number of administrative buildings in the center of the city and set up the so-called ‘self-defense forces,’ which plunged into open fighting with law enforcers. In a period from February 18 to 20, 2014, more than 80 people were killed in Kiev. Hundreds were wounded. Twenty died later in hospital. Among those killed and wounded were officers of the Berkut special police force who were accused of shooting at protesters.