KIEV, November 12. /TASS/. Unidentified people have toppled a monument to founder of the former Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin in the city of Kryvyi Rih. Another monument to Lenin, located in the area of the Southern mining plant, had its head smashed last night, the press service of Kryvyi Rih militia told the UNN agency.
On Tuesday night, the vandals fixed a cable around the monument and pulled the monument down from its foundation. The same was to have been done to the other monument, but the plan did not work. The cable was likewise tied to the monument, but the monument did not give way; only its head was cut off, the press service said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Ukrainian police opened criminal proceedings into an act of vandalism against a monument to Lenin in the Zaporizhia region. Senior inspector of an interior public relations department for Zaporizhia Alexander Soloshenko said that the two-meter monument was obviously pulled down with the help of a car. The vandals also poured some dye all over the sculpture, he said.
Last week, Ukranian law enforcers prevented a group of Zaporizhia nationalists from pulling down a monument to chief of the former Soviet secret police Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The war against monuments unleashed by radical groups in Ukraine at the end of last year, when a monument to Lenin was toppled in Bessarabska Square in the center of Kiev, triggered a mass monument demolition campaign, as a result of which around 300 monuments to Lenin and 70 monuments to other prominent figures of the Soviet era were destroyed in Ukraine.