Overview
- On Sunday President Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled a bronze bust of Hetman Ivan Mazepa at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, accepted a memorial marker and Mazepa’s regalia, and proposed erecting a full-scale Mazepa statue on the Shevchenko Boulevard plinth where a Lenin statue fell in 2013.
- Zelensky signed a decree beginning preparations to mark the Lavra’s 1,000th anniversary, initiating a multi-year program to restore buildings, conserve museum collections, and repair war damage at the UNESCO-listed monastery.
- The Mazepa regalia installed at the Lavra is a rare early-18th-century piece that passed through the Ukrainian People's Republic in exile and was handed to President Leonid Kravchuk in 1992, a provenance officials cited when presenting it to the president.
- The restoration push follows a Russian drone strike on June 15 that badly damaged the Dormition Cathedral’s altar and about 80% of its roof, an attack that prompted emergency evacuations of icons and intensified calls for preservation work.
- Officials and commentators say the monument plan and Lavra program aim to reverse Russian and Soviet narratives that long maligned Mazepa and to use public space and heritage restoration as part of Ukraine’s state-building; the full-scale monument remains a proposed project, not yet realized.