As reported by Tass on Friday, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) encouraged the authorities to rename 908 towns and villages in Ukraine. The reason is that the Verkhovna Rada adopted the law on de-communization. According to the monitoring institute in accordance with the law “On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and prohibition of the promotion of their symbols” the authorities are going to change the names 30 cities and 51 towns, 711 villages and 116 towns, that is noted in the press service UINP message. Moreover, the institute threatened local state authorities that if they do not submit to the Verkhovna Rada the proposals for new names of settlements until 21 November, the Parliament will take a decision on the renaming based on the recommendations of UINP over the next three months, until February 21, 2016. It would be better if Kiev imposed conditions of the Minsk Agreement on the situation in Donbass with such eagerness!
At the same time for some reason no one in UINP dared to mention the fact of how much this “Decommunization” will cost the Ukrainians. It is not difficult to guess that the renaming of the cities will lead to the subsequent change of tens of thousands of road signs. In addition, there will be a need to make changes in all kinds of registers and databases, maps, certificates, etc. All this will cost a lot of money. If not enormous sum of money. But those who rule from Kiev, never think about really vital endeavors for the country.
Most of all “communist names” are going to be erased in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions. The least of the names will be changed on the west of Ukraine. In Ivano-Frankivsk region, for example, there is no settlement, which falls under the law on de-communization. In Lviv and Chernivtsi regions only the names of one village are to be changed. At the same time in Donetsk region the Ukrainian authorities are going to rename 99 settlements, 51 – in Lugansk region, regardless the fact that Donetsk and Lugansk have declared themselves independent from the Ukrainian state.
The original text in Russian: http://www.rg.ru/2015/08/14/ukraina-site-anons.html