ODESSA, April 01 /TASS/. Activists of Ukraine’s nationalist Svoboda /Freedom/ party have declared a war on Russian influence in Odessa’s schools and universities.
They will reveal teachers who popularize and promote the "Russian world" ideas in secondary schools and at institutions of high learning and hold an anti-Ukrainian stance, the Svoboda party’s youth organization said in its statement.
The nationalists urged schoolchildren and students to join the campaign and lodge information against their teachers. The campaign’s organizers said they would hand over the information to Ukraine’s Security Service, subject the politically unreliable teachers to moral obstruction and demand their dismissal, the Svoboda activists said.
In March this year, the nationalists forced teachers in one of the Odessa schools to replace the photos of WWII veterans posted on a stand devoted to the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War /1941-1945/ with photographs of Euro-Maidan who had died in Kiev.
Members of the nationalist Svoboda party have been waging a war on Soviet-era monuments over the past 12 months. They have destroyed dozens of monuments to Lenin and other Soviet leaders installed in Odessa and other populated localities in Ukraine. Each time, they claimed responsibility for those acts of vandalism. Konstantin Vasilets, the deputy head of the Svoboda party’s regional organization, said that the war on monuments was a progressive process in the development of Ukrainian society, which is trying to get rid of the remnants of Soviet occupation.