Overview
- Journalists posted video showing the monument to Mikhail Bulgakov on Andriivskyi Descent being dismantled on June 4, 2026.
- The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, which produced an expert report classifying Bulgakov as a russophone imperialist and ukrainophobe, says the museum will stay open but be renamed and its concept changed while exhibits remain.
- The Institute's report says Bulgakov’s works lack positively drawn Ukrainian characters, mock the Ukrainian language and church, and deny Ukrainian nationhood, and it relies on those findings to treat public use of his name as banned under law.
- Museum staff have called the Institute's characterization emotional and unproven even as they say they began rethinking the museum's concept after the 2022 full‑scale war.
- The removal follows earlier acts like a May 2023 red‑paint attack on a bas‑relief and fits a wider wartime policy of removing or reframing Soviet and Russian symbols seen as legitimizing Russian cultural influence, with effects likely to include more renamings and public debate over preservation versus derussification.