KIEV, December 29. /TASS/. A statue of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, known as the Monument to the Founders of Odessa, has been dismantled in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, the Dumskaya local news outlet reported on Thursday.

The media outlet earlier reported the removal of a monument to 18th century Russian General Alexander Suvorov.

On November 30, members of the Odessa City Council voted to remove both monuments.

The monument to Catherine the Great, first erected in 1900, was dismantled in 1920 and restored in 2007. The statue was repeatedly defaced by vandals. In early November 2022, the city’s authorities announced that Odessa residents had voted to remove the monument.

After the 2014 coup, Ukraine passed a law on decommunization, which provides for the removal of monuments and the renaming of toponyms related to the Soviet era. The Ukrainian authorities renamed over 900 cities, towns and villages, as well as about 50,000 streets, in the past eight years.