The Kiev authorities began dismantling a Soviet-era monument marking the connection between Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday, more than two years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It will take several days to fully tear down the red granite monument, which consists of some 20 elements, the city administration said.
It is a group of statues showing Ukrainian Cossacks surrounding hetman, or "leader," Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and the Moscow ambassador. It sits below a steel rainbow-shaped installation near the bank of the Dnipro River.
The statues, said to weigh some 6,000 to 7,000 tons, are to be relocated to an aviation museum.
The ensemble was built in 1982 to commemorate the "unification of the Ukrainian people with the fraternal Russian people" in 1654, the year that Khmelnytskyi entered an alliance with the Russian czar to combat the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Soviet history books romanticized this as the start of an unbreakable friendship between Ukraine and Russia.
But when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kiev city parliament renamed the 35-metre steel arch above the statues, changing it from the Arch of Friendship between Peoples to the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People, an alteration made in May 2022.
The authorities also removed two bronze figures - who represented a Russian and a Ukrainian worker - from under the arch in April 2022.