For more than a decade, a plinth at the foot of Taras Shevchenko Boulevard in central Kyiv has stood empty, daubed in white paint and graffiti, with a Ukrainian trident stuck where a statue of Vladimir Lenin once gazed out over the city. That sculpture was toppled and smashed with sledgehammers during Ukraine's Maidan revolution of 2013–14, which ousted the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. Now, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has proposed filling the vacant pedestal with a monument to Ivan Mazepa — an 18th-century Cossack military and political leader who broke with Moscow and fought for Ukrainian independence. "I am certain that where Lenin fell, Mazepa will stand firm," Zelenskyy said, speaking beside a newly erected bust of Mazepa at the Pechersk Lavra, an ancient Kyiv monastery that has itself been struck by Russian missiles.

Mazepa served as hetman — head — of Cossack Ukraine in the early 1700s, navigating pressures from both Moscow and Warsaw. When Russia's Peter the Great refused to defend Ukrainian territory from invading Swedish forces, Mazepa switched allegiance and allied with Swedish King Charles XII. The gambit ended in defeat, and Russian and later Soviet authorities branded him a traitor — a characterisation Zelenskyy says was designed to make Ukrainians "view their own history through the eyes of others." Historians today describe Mazepa as a complex figure: a patron of the arts who funded the baroque renovation of the Lavra's 11th-century Dormition Cathedral, and, in the words of one Kyiv cultural professor, "the architect of European Ukraine."

The proposed statue swap has sparked a broader national debate about monuments, memory, and identity. Ukraine began removing Soviet-era symbols after independence in 1991, but the process accelerated sharply following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and intensified again after the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Statues of Russian literary figures such as Alexander Pushkin have come down across the country, and last month workers removed a monument to Mikhail Bulgakov — the Kiev-born author of The Master and Margarita — from the picturesque St Andrew's Descent street, returning it to the family of its late sculptor. The director of Kyiv's Bulgakov museum, while welcoming the statue's removal, questioned whether the Lenin plinth was the right location for a new hero, noting its grim history as a site of wartime executions.

For many Ukrainians, these are not merely aesthetic choices but acts of cultural reclamation. Nataliia Kryvda, a professor of the history of culture at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, argues that Ukraine is navigating an unfinished process of decolonisation. "The USSR absorbed national cultures. It tried to make a single nation of Soviet citizens. Russia today says we are one people — it isn't true," she said. Alim Aliev, a writer and Crimean Tatar activist, echoed the sentiment, noting that Ukraine was now speaking about its past "without mediators." Both voices reflect a wider shift in how Ukrainians are confronting a painful question — one the Bulgakov museum director put simply: "Who am I?"

Why this matters: Ukraine's monument debate is more than a domestic cultural conversation — it reflects the deeper ideological stakes of the ongoing war with Russia. By replacing Soviet symbols with figures from its own distinct history, Ukraine is asserting a national identity separate from the Russian imperial narrative that has long shaped how outsiders, and sometimes Ukrainians themselves, understood the country's past. The placement of Mazepa — long vilified by Moscow — on the very pedestal once occupied by Lenin would carry obvious symbolic weight, both at home and abroad.