Ukraine to remove all Soviet memorials

KIEV, Ukraine, May 18 (UPI) -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said his country should remove all symbols dating back to the communist era, which he sees as being as bad as fascism.

Yushchenko said the Ukraine people were hostages of two totalitarian regimes, communist and fascist, which he said were identical in their hatred towards human beings and their practice of committing mass killings, the Croatian news agency HINA said Monday.

Yushchenko spoke Sunday at a site in a wooded area outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev at a ceremony to remember victims of the Soviet regime's massacres of 1937-1941. He said Soviet dictator Stalin's secret police killed and burned tens of thousands of innocent people, the Serbian news agency Beta said.

Yushchenko said that all over Ukraine more than 400 monuments with Soviet symbols were removed last year, which brought strong denunciations from Russia.

In another dispute, Russian authorities have rejected Yushchenko's proposal to declare as genocide the great famine from 1932-33 when several million people died in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine, Beta said.