OREANDA-NEWS The ruling coalition of the Riga City Council has agreed to demolish the monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, said one of the authors of the initiative, Vice Speaker of the city assembly Linda Ozola.

"Pushkin's days in Kronwald Park are numbered. At the initiative of Kods Riga, the Riga City Council coalition agreed that this illegally erected monument should disappear from the urban environment of Riga, and this should happen," she wrote on Facebook*.

The Kods Rīgai bloc proposed to do this by May 4 in order to prevent a meeting of residents at the monument on May 9 and "stop the split of society and further aggravation of this issue," said the representative of the association Kaspars Adiyans.

According to the deputies, the monument was installed illegally, since it was donated by the Russian Embassy and erected with the participation of the ex-mayor of Riga, Neil Ushakov, but without the support of the State Inspectorate for the Protection of Cultural Monuments and the Council of the Riga Historical Center for Conservation and Protection. Special permits for the demolition of the monument are not needed, according to Kods Riga.

Over the past six months, the monument to Pushkin in Kronwald Park has been desecrated three times. The Russian embassy in Latvia suggested that interested forces are creating a "halo of instability" near it and preparing public opinion for its demolition "almost under the pretext of salvation from vandals."