Workers began removing the old coat of arms in late July, but poor weather and air raids have delayed the work. The completed sculpture will be officially unveiled on August 24 — Ukrainian Independence Day.
The revamp also coincides with a new name for the statue, which was previously known under its Soviet-era name of the Motherland monument.
The change is just one part of a years-long effort in Ukraine to erase the vestiges of Soviet and Russian influence from its public spaces — often by removing monuments and renaming streets to honour Ukrainian artists, poets, and soldiers instead of Russian cultural figures.
Most Soviet and communist symbols were outlawed in Ukraine by the country’s parliament in 2015, but this did not include World War II monuments such as the Mother Ukraine statue.
Some 85 per cent of Ukrainians backed the removal of the hammer and sickle from the landmark, according to data from the country’s Culture Ministry released last year.
For many in Ukraine, the Soviet past is synonymous with Russian imperialism, the oppression of the Ukrainian language, and the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians and has been recognised as an act of genocide by both the European Parliament and the United States.
The de-communisation movement has only been accelerated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 last year, where assertions of national identity have become an important show of unity as the country struggles under the horror of war.
In a statement on its website marking the emblem’s removal, Ukraine’s national World War II museum described the Soviet coat of arms as a symbol of a totalitarian regime that “destroyed millions of people”.
“Together with the coat of arms, we’ve disposed the markers of our belonging to the ‘post-Soviet space’. We are not ‘post-’, but sovereign, independent and free Ukraine.”
