Poland has dismantled four communist-era monuments to Red Army soldiers in a renewed drive to remove symbols of Moscow’s post-Second World War domination and to stress its condemnation of Moscow’s current war on neighbouring Ukraine. Workers used drills and heavy equipment to destroy the 1945 monuments at four locations across Poland on Thursday. Most of them were in the form of concrete obelisks dedicated to Red Army soldiers who fell while fighting to defeat Nazi German troops. Head of the state historical institute Karol Nawrocki, who has called for the removals, said the monuments stood for a system that was guilty of enslaving and murdering its own people and other nations, including Poles. “This is a monument to disgrace, a monument of contempt of the winners over the victims,” Nawrocki said in Glubczyce, in the south of Poland, as workers were readying to remove the figure of a Red Army soldier prior to dismantling the entire monument.
