August 22, just two days before Ukraine’s Independence Day celebrations, the statue “Bitter Memory of Childhood” at the Holodomor memorial complex in Kyiv was desecrated. The statue of a young starving girl holding several stalks of grain is an internationally recognized symbol for one of the most tragic pages in Ukraine’s history: the genocidal famine engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that killed millions of people on Ukrainian territory.
The general director of the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide, Olesia Stasiuk, was quoted by the BBC as saying that sometime during the might of August 21-22, three unknown persons torn the statue off its pedestal. “Thank God, the statue itself was not damaged, because they could not lift it, it was too heavy.”