Goodbye, Pushkin. Ukrainians target Russian street names, monuments.

The only reason more Russian statues haven’t been toppled lately, Sternenko said, is that Ukrainians have been too busy fighting a war.“After we win the war, we will have time and we will clear all the Soviet and Russian imperial monuments from Ukraine,” said Sternenko, a former regional head of the ultranationalist militant group Right Sector who said his sights are set on a monumental statue of Catherine the Great in his hometown, Odessa.Ukrainians have seized on the importance of asserting their own historical legacy with more urgency since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war on their country Feb. 24.The Ukrainian reckoning has echoes in the debate over removing Confederate statues, reappraising American colonial history and ditching racist vestiges of the past, from professional baseball team mascots to Aunt Jemima’s syrup.“This is an interesting characteristic of our time in general, that we began to comprehend history so sensitively,” said Anton Drobovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. The boulevard itself — though renamed years ago for a prominent Ukrainian historian — still has at least one stone plaque showing that it had once been Karl Marx Avenue.From the archives: crowds of protesters face off over Lenin Statue in KharkhivYaroslav Hrytsak, director of the Institute for Historical Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, said that when he was growing up, the ubiquity of Russian and Soviet markers became a kind of imperial wallpaper.“I accepted it as a dull Soviet landscape,” Hrytsak said. “The politics of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine was a total amnesia.”Bilingual Ukrainians abandon Russian after Putin launches warThe effort to recover Ukraine’s cultural heritage has picked up speed in recent weeks.The mayor of Mykolaiv announced Saturday on Telegram that a Pushkin memorial had been removed because, he said, it needed protection from vandals.