Darya Dugyna and Aleksandra Zakharchenko streets appeared in Melitopol

About two dozen streets have been renamed in Melitopol, Zaporozhye region, which is under the control of the Russian authorities. The decree to this effect was signed by the head of the city administration appointed by Russia, Galina Danylchenko. For example, the streets of Rosgvardiya, Darya Dugyna and Aleksandra Zakharchenko appeared in the city.

Daria Dugina is a philosopher and publicist who supported the war in Ukraine, the daughter of one of the ideologues of the “Russian world” Alexander Dugin. She died in August 2022 as a result of a terrorist attack: her car was blown up. The Russian authorities blamed the Ukrainian special services for the bombing, but neither the perpetrators nor the perpetrators of the crime were found.

Alexander Zakharchenko is the first self-proclaimed leader of the so-called “DNR”. He was killed in 2018 as a result of an explosion in the center of Donetsk. His associates regard the explosion as a terrorist act.

Halyna Danylchenko reported that the decision to rename the streets was made by the public council, which included historians and local historians, taking into account the opinion of the city’s residents.

Ukrainskaya Street in the city was renamed Sovetskaya Street, Hetmanskaya Street – Lenina Street. Some streets were given back the names they had in the USSR – Frunze, Gorky, Karl Marx and others.

At the end of January, Danilchenko already announced the return of a number of Melitopol streets named after the Soviets, such as Krupskaya, Dzerzhinsky, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze and other figures of the Soviet era, the Bolshevik Party and the international communist movement.

Danylchenko, announcing the changes, mentioned the previous wave renamed to Melitopol: in 2016, as part of the decommunization announced by the Ukrainian authorities. According to the official, then “many streets were named after Ukrainian Nazi ideologues.” At the same time, out of more than eighty streets that are planned to be given Soviet names, only a few bore the names of representatives of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

• Melitopol was captured by Russian troops at the beginning of March last year. On September 30, 2022, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree on the annexation of the Zaporozhye region, where the city is located, along with several other occupied Ukrainian territories, to Russia. This decision is not recognized by the vast majority of countries in the world.
• Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian authorities dismantled hundreds of monuments and renamed several thousand streets that were somehow connected with the USSR and Russia in dozens of Ukrainian cities. After the beginning of a full-scale armed invasion of Russian troops on Ukrainian territory in February of last year, streets connected with Russia’s imperial past began to be renamed in a number of Ukrainian cities.