However, the sloppy and chaotic way the renaming of streets and cities is done now under the 2015 decommunization law suggests that it is more of a government’s publicity stunt than a meaningful change.

For Ukraine’s officials, many of whom spent their youth raising the same names that they are now so gleefully erasing, the decommunization process is nothing more than a cheap way to win the voters’ favor and outweigh their many faults.

But even that doesn’t guarantee a quick goodbye to the disgraced Soviet names. It’s been a year since the law came in force, and yet there is still a lot to be done.

The last week was rich in the illustration of the sloppiness of that process. First, Komsomolsk, a city in Poltava Oblast, got suddenly renamed as Horishni Plavni. A historic name of a village that preceded the city, it translates as Upper Reed Beds. The citizens are unhappy with the new name which they find unfit for a big city.

Then, Kyiv itself got confused when Culture Minister Yevhen Nyshchuk said that the authorities will “certainly” demolish the People’s Friendship Arch, installed in the city in 1982 as a symbol of Ukrainian-Russian friendship. While the steel rainbow looks out of place in the current state of war, it has become a part of the landscape that Kyivans don’t want to give up. Nyshchuk quickly backed out, assuring everyone that his idea was misunderstood and that the monument is safe.

Or take the example of Borys Filatov, the mayor of the city formerly know as Dnipropetrovsk. The city got renamed as Dnipro on May 19 to erase the trace of a prominent communist Grigory Petrovsky. The mayor changed his mind at least twice, going from protesting it to passionately welcoming it and then to moderately approving it – in a clumsy attempt to please everyone.

There isn’t an event that Ukrainian politicians can’t turn into a circus and the historic renunciation of superficial symbols of the Soviet past is no exception.