While a few days ago Lviv’s Hill of Glory has been liquidated, there were 355 bodies of the fallen soldiers exhumed. These are the remains of the Red Army soldiers who fell while fighting for the liberation of the city of Lviv in 1944. The liquidation of the Hill of Glory is bad enough. It has been carried out within the framework of the demolishing of all memorials, monuments and plaques to Ukraine’s Soviet past. Damnatio memoriae. What is worse is that Lviv’s mayor Andriy Sadoviy made a suggestion of exchanging the corpses for… Ukrainian prisoners of war that happen to be in Russian hands. To put it otherwise: he proposed to trade the dead for the un-dead. A morally reprehensible proposal. Probably, to make his offer even more attractive (or maybe catchy for the Western media) the mayor mentioned that the surname of one of the prisoners was Putin. And yes, some of the media outlets made use of this coincidence.
This wave of demolishing memorials having anything to do with the former Soviet Union has swept across the countries that used to be in the Soviet sphere of interests. Just as the demolition of monuments or plaques to CheKa’s head Felix Dzerzhinsky are perfectly understandable and legitimate, so the removal of the memorials to the Red Army soldiers and generals are doubtful. Certainly, the liquidation of war cemeteries is beyond an act of barbarity and a display of bad taste. The remains of the dead – and those fallen on the battlefield – ought to be at least left in peace, if they cannot be properly respected and taken care of.
You might think that the Western media would be upset over the mayor of Lviv’s proposal. No, they aren’t, and, truly, you are not surprised in the least. If something like that were proposed by a mayor of a Russian city, that would trigger a huge wave of criticism and condemnation. By now we have grown accustomed to the double standards that are being applied in the media, aren’t we?
