The police received a call, saying that 14 masked men, using sledgehammers and pincers, were chipping off a concrete memorial plaque on the facade of a building on Zhukov Street in Kiev.
Law enforcement officers discovered the damaged plaque at the scene. Young people fled before the arrival of the investigation group.
Information about the young people, along with their descriptions, was shared among police patrols and soon all the participants of the incident were taken into custody at the local police department to establish all the circumstances.
The group's members were all students between the ages of 14 and 18 from Kiev and the Kiev region.
Verkhovna Rada lawmaker and far-right activist Ihor Mosiychuk, who had been arrested for his participation in a plot to blow up a Lenin statue in 2011 but was released following the country's February 2014 Euromaidan coup, stated on his Facebook page that he "gave a lecture on decommunisation" to the police officers, who had detained the group of teenagers who had desecrated the memorial to Zhukov.
Kiev teens dismantled (desecrated) a memorial plaque in honor of the Soviet Ukrainophobic Marshall Georgy Zhukov. Police detained the activists. I had to read a lecture on decommunisation to the cops. It seems like everybody had been released
Posted by Ігор Мосійчук on Saturday, 16 May 2015
Earlier this week the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed several decommunisation laws banning Soviet symbols, which denounced the Communist regime [of 1917-1991] and allowed access to the classified archives of the Soviet secret services and recognized members of UPA and other nationalist organizations as fighters for Ukraine's independence.
