KYIV. June 26 (Interfax) - Unidentified individuals dismantled a memorial tablet commemorating Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov in Odesa in the early hours of Sunday, Ukraine.
The Odesa city branch of the Svoboda (Liberty) All-Ukrainian Union nationalist movement was the first to report the incident at about 3 a.m. on Sunday June 25. However, the report lacked any indication of who had removed the plaque. "There is no more memorial plaque in honor of Zhukov in Odesa," the movement's Odesa branch said in a post on its Facebook page.
The report was illustrated by a night photo of the place where the plaque used to be seen and an older image of the plaque, which was attached to the wall of the apartment building at 5A Zhukov avenue, Odesa in 2016. The street was later renamed Heroiv Nebesnoi Sotni (Heroes of The Heavenly Hundred) Avenue.
The white marble plaque dated back to 1995 and said that the avenue was named after Georgy Zhukov, a Soviet marshal of the WWII era who was for some time the commander of the Odesa Military District after the war ended. The plaque also featured a photograph of the four times Hero of the Soviet Union.
As reported earlier, Odesa civil society activists forced the authorities to remove on May 7 the stepping stone of a prospective monument to Zhukov set earlier at the same avenue by Ukrainian Communist Party activists, who had planned to later erect a full-format monument there. The argument that followed between the activists and police resulted in utility workers arriving at the scene and removing the stone.