In Kharkiv, 18 streets connected with Russia will receive new names. The corresponding decision was made on Tuesday, February 28, at an extraordinary session of the Kharkiv City Council.
“Eighteen toponyms were given new names, and Kremlevskaya Street was removed from the city map, since there are no buildings on it that require addressing,” the city council said in a statement.
Shortly before this, the Kharkiv authorities reported that they had invited residents to discuss the renaming of streets. In particular, Bryansky lane to Kholodnoyarsky – after the name of one of the mechanized brigades of the Ukrainian army, Kabardinskaya street to Lesnaya Song street in honor of the play of the same name by Lesya Ukrainka.
As noted, the proposed names were developed by the joint efforts of the Kharkiv toponymic group, the Academician P.T. Tronko Center for Local Lore, the Kharkiv Sociological Network and the Toponymy Department of the Kharkiv City Council.
In the same month, it became known that 23 streets were renamed in the Zhytomyr region. The streets of Yuri Gagarin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the Soviet test pilot Valery Chkalov and a number of others were subjected to “de-Russification”.
Earlier it was reported that by the beginning of 2022, the Ukrainian authorities had demolished more than 2.5 thousand monuments, changed the names of more than 900 settlements and about 50 thousand streets.
The policy of decommunization has been carried out in Ukraine since 2015. Within the framework of the adopted law “On the condemnation of the communist and Nazi regimes”, it is planned to rename all topographic objects whose names are in any way connected with the USSR, as well as the demolition of monuments and the dismantling of memorial plaques. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in turn, stated that the Ukrainian authorities have been pursuing a policy of aggressive de-Russification and forced assimilation for many years.
