The plinth at the bottom of Taras Shevchenko Boulevard in Kyiv has been eerily empty since 2013. The Soviet-era statue of Vladimir Lenin was toppled by a crowd during Ukraine's Maidan revolution in 2013-14 and smashed with sledgehammers. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

In June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed putting a new figure on the plinth: Ivan Mazepa, a Cossack military and political leader who broke with Moscow and fought for Ukraine's independence. "I am certain that where Lenin fell, Mazepa will stand firm," Zelenskyy said. He spoke next to a bust of Mazepa in the Pechersk Lavra, an ancient Kyiv monastery hit by Russian missiles.

The proposed swap of Lenin for Mazepa has triggered a lively debate about monuments and what they say about changing national identity. After winning independence in 1991, Ukraine removed large numbers of Soviet-era statues and renamed streets as part of "decommunisation". The process sped up in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas, and moved even faster after Vladimir Putin's 2022 full-scale invasion.

Nataliia Kryvda, a professor of the history of culture at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, said Ukraine was going through an unfinished period of decolonisation. "The USSR absorbed national cultures. It tried to make a single nation of Soviet citizens. Russia today looks at Ukraine and says we are one people. It isn't true. We have our own mindset, historical destiny, beliefs and dreams. Our identity is a dynamic process," she said.

Standing next to the ex-Lenin plinth, Kryvda said she was in favour of a Mazepa monument. "Why not? He's our leader. Each culture needs to mark its space with memorials. They objectify memory," she said. She described Mazepa as a "contradictory personality" and not an "ideal hero". "He really was a friend and political partner of Russia, right up until the moment he dramatically changed his life and history," she added.

As hetman, or head, of Cossack Ukraine, Mazepa sought to balance the demands of neighbouring Moscow and Warsaw. In 1708, the Russian emperor Peter the Great refused to protect Ukrainian territory from invading Swedes. Mazepa abandoned the tsar and formed an alliance with the Swedish King Charles XII, an act that ended in defeat and led the Bolsheviks to call modern Ukrainian patriots "Mazepists". "Mazepa was the architect of European Ukraine," Kryvda said.

In his speech at the Pechersk Lavra, Zelenskyy said Russia had smeared Mazepa for centuries, depicting him as a traitor. Their goal, he said, was to make Ukrainians "view their own history through the eyes of others".

Alim Aliev, a writer and Crimean Tatar campaigner, said Ukraine was belatedly recovering its identity. "We are reclaiming our own voices and names," he said. He cited the example of the 20th-century Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Stus, whose image will appear in September on a new 2,000 Hryvnia note. Stus studied in Donetsk, the eastern Donbas city occupied by Russia, and led Ukraine's national revival. He died in 1985 in a Soviet prison camp.

In Aliev's view, Ukraine was now speaking about its past "without mediators" and said it was appropriate that statues of the 19th-century Russian poet Pushkin had been taken down across the country. "He had a totally imperial view of Crimea," Aliev said, citing Pushkin's narrative poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. "He exoticises Crimean Tatars and describes us from a colonial perspective." Of the Mazepa statue, he added: "I don't think it's a controversial idea."

Last month workmen took away a monument to another Russian literary giant Mikhail Bulgakov. It had stood since 2007 outside the house where Bulgakov lived, in one of Kyiv's most attractive streets, St Andrew's Descent. Kyiv's city council voted to remove it. Other plaques to Bulgakov, born in Kyiv to a Russian family when it was part of the Russian empire, have already been taken down, including one outside the university where he studied medicine. Bulgakov's museum – housed in the writer's home – remains open.

The museum's director, Liudmyla Habianuri, said she was not opposed to the sculpture's removal and dismissed a petition to keep it as "bland". She acknowledged that Bulgakov had written negatively about Ukrainian nationalist forces in his Kyiv novel The White Guard, set in the winter of 1918-19, amid revolution and war. She stressed, however: "Bulgakov was a witness to his times. And a satirist. He didn't like anybody. That included communists and priests."

Habianuri said Russia's war had changed Ukrainians' attitudes to cultural heritage. "We are redefining who we are and what we value," she said.