On the streets of Kyiv, Fyodor Dostoevsky is on the way out. Andy Warhol is on the way in.

Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase the vestiges of Soviet and Russian influence from its public spaces by pulling down monuments and renaming hundreds of streets to honour its own artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others — including heroes of this year’s war.

Following Moscow’s invasion on February 24, which has killed or injured untold numbers of civilians and soldiers and pummelled buildings and infrastructure, Ukraine’s leaders have shifted a campaign that once focused on dismantling its communist past into one of “de-Russification”.

Streets that honoured revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin or the Bolshevik Revolution were largely already gone; now Russia, not the country’s Soviet legacy, is the enemy.

It’s part punishment for crimes meted out by Russia, and part affirmation of a national identity by honouring Ukrainian notables who have been mostly overlooked.

Russia, through the Soviet Union, is seen by many in Ukraine as having dominated its smaller south-western neighbour for generations, consigning its artists, poets and military heroes to relative obscurity, compared with more famous Russians.

If the victors write history, as some say, Ukrainians are doing some rewriting of their own — even as their fate hangs in the balance. Their national identity is having what may be an unprecedented surge, in ways large and small.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken to wearing a black T-shirt that says: “I’m Ukrainian.”

He is among the many Ukrainians who were born speaking Russian as a first language. Now, they shun it — or at least limit their use of it.

Ukrainian has traditionally been spoken more in the western part of the country — a region that early on shunned Russian and Soviet imagery.

Large parts of northern, eastern and central Ukraine are making that linguistic change.

The eastern city of Dnipro on Friday pulled down a bust of Alexander Pushkin — like Dostoevsky, a giant of 19th-century Russian literature.

A strap from a crane was unceremoniously looped under the statue’s chin.

This month, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko announced about 30 more streets in the capital will be rechristened.

Volodymyr Prokopiv, deputy head of the Kyiv City Council, said Ukraine’s “de-communisation” policy since 2015 had been applied in a “soft” way so as not to offend sensitivities among the country’s Russian-speaking and even pro-Moscow population.

“With the war, everything changed. Now the Russian lobby is now powerless – in fact, it doesn’t exist,” Mr Prokopiv said in his office overlooking Khreschatik Street, the capital’s main thoroughfare.

During the war, the Russians have also sought to stamp their culture and domination in areas they have occupied.

Andrew Wilson, a professor at University College London, cautioned about “the dangers in rewriting the periods in history where Ukrainians and Russians did cooperate and build things together”.

“I think the whole point about de-imperialising Russian culture should be to specify where we have previously been blind — often in the West,” Dr Wilson said.

He noted that the Ukrainians “are taking a pretty broad-brush approach”, citing Pushkin, the 19th-century Russian writer who might understandably rankle some Ukrainians.

To them, for example, the Cossacks — a Slavic people in eastern Europe — “mean freedom, whereas Pushkin depicts them as cruel, barbarous, antiquated. And in need of Russian civilisation,” said Dr Wilson, whose book The Ukrainians was recently published in its fifth edition.

Street renaming program intensifying

In its program, Kyiv conducted an online survey, and received 280,000 suggestions in a single day, Mr Prokopiv said.

An expert group then sifted through the responses, and municipal officials and street residents give a final stamp of approval.