KIEV, December 30. /TASS/. More than 7,600 place names, related to Soviet Union and Russia, were changed in Ukraine over the past year, Ukrainian Culture and Information Policy Minister Alexander Tkachenko has said.

"According to incomplete data from 14 regions, a total of 7,652 placenames have been changed," he told a roundtable on Thursday.

"Preliminary calculations indicate that 28 monuments to [Russian writer and poet Alexander] Pushkin, nine to [Russian writer Maxim] Gorky, 20 memorial installations to honor Soviet liberators, four monuments to [Soviet writer Nikolay] Ostrovsky and four to [Russian general Alexander] Suvorov have been demolished," the Ukrinform agency quoted him as saying.

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.