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A recent event that I’m sure fully counts as culture war is the official removal in Odessa of the monument to the city’s founders, mainly Catherine the Great. The justification, which is rather easy to predict, is that Catherine was a perpetrator of Moskal imperialism who repressed Ukrainian patriots (supposedly they already existed back then), committed cultural genocide and erased Ukrainian nationhood (which obviously we’re also supposed to believe existed back then). There isn’t much to comment on this, I think (though I’ll again point out that Odessa would never have existed in the first place without Catherine), but an educated redditor was eager to point out* the curious fact that the removed monument is actually a replica erected in 2007, largely as a response to the events of the so-called Orange Revolution, as the original was removed (and supposedly destroyed) by the Soviets in 1920. So yes, it was originally removed as an imperialist relic, by powers that the Ukrainian authorities claim later perpetrated genocide specifically against Ukrainians because they were Ukrainians i.e. it was an incident between opposing factions of Ukraine deniers. This is where we’re at, which actually doesn’t surprise me that much because I believe we’ve been in a clown world for a long time.
*https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/zyccgk/catherine_the_great_statue_taken_down_in_odesa/
I'm not seeing this as a war within a culture. By the general article, less than a tenth wanted the statue to remain unchanged, and of the remainder not even half wanted to keep it anywhere as a historical item. Even destroying it was a majority (just over 50%) in the poll cited by the EuroNews article behind the reddit post.
The factor that made various statue removal/vandalism stories a culture war item in the United States was the dynamic in many cases that outsiders, not the locals, were the one pushing for/demanding the removal or conducting vandalism. These were cases of imposition, or ideological colonization of a area by outside groups that lacked local community support.
That dynamic doesn't really exist when over 50% of the poll of local residents is for outright destruction of the statue.
Those are valid points, however I’d also point out the following.
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I’m sure a similar poll would have yielded similar results in, say, Charlottesville or Richmond, (also) due to the number of left-leaning college students and Beltway region transplants among the local population, back when the local prominent Confederate statues were removed. I’m also sure that outside groups normally played a big part, but not the sole part or an outsized one. And we know that, in the end, not one politician/lawmaker on the local or state level dared to make the argument that the statues should remain, and the only people willing to protest their vandalization and removal were all dismissed as Nazis. So I leave it to you to consider to what extent do these incidents count as “war within a culture”, if that culture is (in the narrow sense) Virginia.
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We also don’t know if that poll was cooked or not – it probably isn’t, because then the result would likely be more lopsided, but it’s possibility for sure. On the other hand, we can be sure that any Ukrainian citizen wanting to openly object to this decision is given more than ample reason not to do so.
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