Throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine, efforts continue to systematically erase all traces of Ukrainian national memory. This campaign against monuments and memorials is chilling proof that Russia’s invasion goes far beyond mere border revisions and ultimately aims to wipe Ukraine off the map entirely.
The modern history of a single park in east Ukrainian city Luhansk offers insights into the memory war currently being waged by the Kremlin. In 1972, the Communist authorities in Soviet Luhansk decided to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR by transforming a local cemetery into a Friendship of Peoples Park. Once construction got underway, workers soon began uncovering mass graves of people murdered during the Stalin era. This news was suppressed until 1989, when it was belatedly reported in the local newspaper. One year later, a memorial to the victims of Stalinist mass killings was erected at the site.
This initial monument was part of a broader movement for historical justice that emerged in the twilight years of the USSR as local historians, journalists, and officials sought to document the crimes of the Communist authorities in the Luhansk region. Following Ukrainian independence, the opening of national archives made it possible to identify and honor victims of the Communist regime and end decades of censorship that had suppressed knowledge of Soviet crimes against humanity including the Holodomor, an artificially engineered famine in 1930s Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians.
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During the early years of Ukrainian independence, Luhansk’s Friendship of Peoples Park remained a space of contested memory. While retaining its old Soviet era name, it gradually acquired a range of new memorials including a monument to Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, a cross marking the grave of the city’s former mayor, and a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor.
In 2009, following decades of public pressure, the park was renamed as the Garden of Remembrance. At this point, it seemed as though the long task of restoring historical memory in Luhansk was finally complete. However, the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 transformed the memory politics of the region once again and revived many of the darkest chapters of the Soviet years.
When Kremlin forces occupied Luhansk in the spring of 2014, they soon began attempting to transform remembrance of the Soviet era. While monuments to Lenin were being dismantled elsewhere in Ukraine, the Russian authorities in Luhansk were erecting new monuments glorifying the Soviet past and celebrating the “liberation” of the city from Ukrainian rule. This mirrored similar processes that were underway in other Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including nearby Donetsk and the Crimean peninsula.
Curiously, many memorials in Luhansk honoring the victims of the Soviet era initially remained untouched. This changed with the full-scale invasion of February 2022, which led to a more aggressive approach to the eradication of Ukrainian historical memory. In the second half of 2022, the Holodomor memorial in Mariupol was demolished. By summer 2024, the Russian occupation authorities had also dismantled monuments in Luhansk honoring the victims of the Holodomor and the Stalinist Terror.
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The occupation authorities in Luhansk have attempted to justify these measures by framing the Holodomor as a Ukrainian propaganda myth and positioning memorials to the victims of Soviet crimes as “pilgrimage sites for Ukrainian nationalists.” They have also argued that the dismantling of monuments is in response to grassroots demands from the local population.
Russia’s selective monument removals are part of a deliberate strategy to rehabilitate favorable aspects of the Soviet past while whitewashing the crimes of the Communist era. A similarly partisan approach has been adopted toward the historical role of Tsarist Russia. Throughout occupied regions of Ukraine, the Kremlin seeks to craft a narrative glorifying Russian imperialism that legitimizes Moscow’s land grab while suppressing any traces of a separate Ukrainian national identity. In this manner, Putin is weaponizing the past to serve his own present-day geopolitical ambitions.
The demolition of memorials is only one aspect of Russia’s war on Ukrainian national identity. In areas of Ukraine under Kremlin control, anyone deemed pro-Ukrainian is at risk of being detained or simply disappearing. Speaking Ukrainian is considered a serious offense. Ukrainians are pressured into accepting Russian citizenship, while thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and sent to Russia, where they are subjected to indoctrination in camps designed to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage.
Unlike earlier attempts to erase entire nations, today’s Kremlin campaign to extinguish Ukrainian identity is taking place in full view of international audiences in the heart of twenty-first century Europe. This poses fundamental challenges to the entire notion of a rules-based international order and represents a major obstacle to any future peace process. As long as Russia remains committed to the destruction of Ukraine, a truly sustainable settlement to today’s war will remain elusive.
Yevhenii Monastyrskyi is a PhD student of history at Harvard University and a lecturer at Kyiv School of Economics. John Vsetecka is an assistant professor of history at Nova Southeastern University.
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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.
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Image: A service member of pro-Russian troops holds a Soviet-era flag, which was raised to mark the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two, at a monument "I love Lysychansk" during Ukraine-Russia conflict in the city of Lysychansk in the Luhansk Region, Ukraine July 4, 2022. (REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko)