KIEV, October 2. /TASS/. A monument to Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin has been dismantled in downtown Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, in the third such incident over the past few days in the country, the local administration said on Thursday.
The officials failed to confirm that a group of nationalists, who have been threatening to topple the monument, could be linked to the vandalism act. Earlier, local radicals had tried to bring down the statue, but the action was prevented by police.
“This issue is controlled by competent structures. Police have been sent to the scene,” said a spokesman for the administration of Kryvyi Rih, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region.
The Ukrainian city already witnessed two similar incidents earlier this year, when one Lenin statue was brought down in late February and another one was desecrated in January.
{article_photo:751791:'Russian communists compare Lenin statue demolition in Ukraine to zombie movies':'left':'50'}Bringing down Lenin statues
A wave of Lenin monument demolitions hit south-eastern Ukraine over the past week. On September 28, participants of a rally for unity in Ukraine in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, toppled a 20-meter monument with the use of cables and a crane.
On the same night, another monument to Lenin was torn down in the eastern Kharkiv region’s Dergachi, close to Ukraine’s border with Russia.
The latest wave of Lenin statues being pulled down comes following a similar spree across Ukraine this winter. The fall of a massive Lenin monument took place in Kiev in early December during the Euromaidan protests.
The Lenin statues continued falling down in the country this summer. At least three statue demolition incidents were reported in Kharkiv in August, and another three Lenin monuments were destroyed in the Odessa Region.
An 8-meter monument to Lenin, built in 1987, was brought down in Mariupol, in south-eastern Ukraine.