Friendship broken

Public memory and contested monuments:

On a warm, but dramatically clouded June day, we walked to one of Kyiv’s best-known public monuments: the Arch of Friendship, or at least, that was once its official name. Unofficially, Ukrainians have long called this monument built in 1982 the ‘yoke’, as the friendship it referred to was that between Ukraine and russia.

In 2018, in honour of Ukrainian political prisoners being held by the kremlin, the arch’s nickname was physically rendered by artists, who painted the crack in the arch.

This picture is especially for interesting for what’s not in it: the bronze statues of a russian and Ukrainian holding a ribbon of friendship in their hands. When russia invaded in 2022, Ukrainians went further in physically representing the russian betrayal of friendship: the statues were taken away.

The next question became whether the arch should be taken away. But the Kyivites have landed on another approach: they have reclaimed the monument for themselves. The arch has been renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People, and it can be proudly seen from far and wide from where it stands on one of Kyiv’s tallest hills.