UKRAINE’S communists condemned “state vandalism” today as authorities in Lviv said they would dismantle the city’s Monument of Glory, a memorial to Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Nazi invasion.

Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko denounced the act as “moral terrorism” which is “a crime against the memory of the soldiers of the Red Army, a slap in the face of the international community and to all members of the anti-Hitler alliance.”

Ukrainian authorities have dismantled thousands of Soviet-era monuments and renamed hundreds of streets since the fascist-backed “Maidan” coup of 2014, but Lviv’s Monument of Glory had survived because the Institute of National Remembrance, an institution tasked with “decommunisation,” said it was not a specifically communist symbol but one commemorating the defeat of the Nazis.

But neonazis have repeatedly vandalised the monument. The city authorities’ claim that it is unstable and dangerous was slammed as “hypocritical” by the Communist Party, which pointed out that they plan to remove it to the anti-communist “Territory of Terror” museum.