Unknown people on May 25 demolished part of a monument to officers of the Soviet Union's Cheka secret police in Kyiv.
The remaining part of the monument is expected to be transferred to a museum.
Andrey Fishchuk, head of City Hall’s public works department, told the Segodnya newspaper that he did not know where the excavator with a hydraulic hammer came from. He also said his department had not issued any permits for these demolition works.
He said City Hall was planning to dismantle the monument in a “civilized way” and transfer it to a museum of Soviet monuments.
No one claimed responsibility for the demolishion works but Yevgeny Molar from the Isolation art foundation said the decision to dismantle the monument had been made by Kyiv’s Holosiivsky district adminstration.
This is the fifth attempt to demolish or damage the monument. The previous attempts took place in 2009, during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, in March 2014 and last month.
Under Ukraine’s decommunization law, the authorities were required to remove the monument by Feb. 21, 2016, but this did not happen.
The Cheka was Soviet Russia’s secret police and security agency from 1917 to 1922. It organized the Red Terror, which involved the killing of thousands of dissidents.
