Aggressors may consolidate the seizure of land with material signs of their own power: crosses and foundation stones at the moment of occupation, monuments to conquerors, memorial plaques and stelae, coats of arms, places of worship raised on the sites of other peoples' sanctuaries. Unlike the renaming of place names, which operates in speech and on the map, a sign occupies physical space and can be removed only by hand. It declares the seizure irreversible and dates the history of the place from the arrival of the metropole: the pedestal of the monument to Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Kyiv (1888) bore the inscription "To Bohdan Khmelnytsky, one and indivisible Russia", while the plaques on the monument to Muravyov-Amursky in Khabarovsk (1891) listed those "who took an active part in the annexation of the Amur region to Russia".
In 1804-1811 the Russian Empire erected a cast-iron Monument of Glory in the center of Poltava in memory of its victory over the army of Charles XII on 27 June 1709 - with the city's own money and to a design sent from St. Petersburg. By the imperial decree to the Senate of 11 September 1804, "On leaving the villages formerly owned by the city of Poltava under state administration and on releasing the income collected from them to the local Governor-General for the erection in Poltava of a monument in memory of 27 June 1709," the city's revenues were assigned to the monument: "the community of Poltava citizens, through a petition submitted to Governor-General Prince Kurakin, has designated all these revenues for the construction in Poltava of a monument in memory of the day unforgettable for Russia, 27 June 1709, and so we command: the revenues now due for payment, as well as those henceforth collected in favor of this city, shall be released to the local Governor-General until the monument that has been begun is completely finished"[1]. By a second act, the imperial rescript of 9 May 1805 to the Governor-General of Little Russia, "On the erection of a monument in commemoration of the victory won at Poltava by Emperor Peter the Great," the emperor sent a ready-made design and ordered construction to begin: "I forward to you herewith the plans for this monument, drawn up here, charging you... to proceed with its erection on site, except for the bronze ornaments belonging to it, which will be made separately here and delivered to their destination"[1]. That is, Poltava pays, while Petersburg decides what the sign on its land will look like - down to the bronze, which is cast there and shipped ready-made. The monument was founded on 27 June 1804, the cast-iron column was raised in May 1809 under the direction of Moskvin, an engineer of the Luhansk works, and the whole ensemble was opened on 27 June 1811, for the next anniversary of the battle[2][3]. On the medallion of the upper square of the pedestal, inside a serpent ring between two quivers, stood "June the 27th, 1709," and on the opposite side - "Finished in 1809"[2]: the date of someone else's victory was made into the date of the place itself. Both inscriptions, together with the bronze bas-reliefs, disappeared in 1901 - the pre-revolutionary survey records it tersely: "This inscription and the preceding one were destroyed in 1901, and at the same time the bronze bas-reliefs that surrounded them were taken by persons unknown"[2]; they were restored only during the capital repairs of 1953[3]. The monument still stands in Poltava: as of August 2026 it is listed as a monument of national significance under heritage protection number 160010-Н[4], the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance recommended dismantling it in a letter of 29 July 2024[5], but decisions on monuments of national significance are made by the government, and the list of such decisions as of 20 May 2026 does not include the monument[6].
On 15 March 1873 the coat of arms of the Terek oblast was approved: "In a black shield, a silver wavy bend to the right. An Imperial standard on a golden staff. The shield is crowned with the ancient Tsar's Crown and surrounded by golden oak leaves joined by the Alexander ribbon"[7]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova reads the meaning of the sign thus: the silver bend is the Terek, which had long been a border, and now "both its banks were united by the Imperial standard, and the Terek became fully Russian - such is the basic meaning of this coat of arms"[7]. The draft coat of arms of the city of Grozny was made by B. V. Köhne, an official of the Heraldry Office: on an azure shield a silver mountain between two golden sea lilies, and in the dexter canton - the arms of the Terek oblast[7], so that the city's emblem carried the imperial symbol of the oblast. The land was marked with the figure of the conqueror as well. The first monument to Yermolov in Grozny was "the carefully preserved dugout in which he lived during the founding of the Groznaya fortress"[7], and later a bronze bust of the general was set up by the dugout. What this sign meant, Ibragimova puts thus: the bust recalled the most tragic years of the conquest of the Caucasus and was a symbol of the dramatic fate of the mountain peoples, and the monument to the general who "with barbaric cruelty exterminated whole peoples in the name of the conquest of the Caucasus" became for Chechens "a kind of 'eyesore'"[7]. The sign outlived the empire: under Soviet rule the monument "was blown up by night with enviable regularity and just as regularly restored by night"[7].
On 11 July 1888 the Russian Empire unveiled the Bohdan Khmelnytsky monument on Sophia Square in Kyiv - a sign of "unity" with Moscow: on the left side of the pedestal stood the dates "1654-1888," counting the city's history from the Pereiaslav Rada[8]. The committee for its construction was headed by Mikhail Yuzefovich[8] - an official of the Kyiv educational district and author of the memorandum that formed the basis of the Ems ukase of 1876[9]. The conference convened over that memorandum, sitting with Yuzefovich's participation, resolved "not to permit the import into the empire, without special authorization of the Main Administration for Press Affairs, of any books or brochures whatsoever published abroad in the Little Russian dialect," and "to forbid the printing and publishing in the empire of original works and translations in that dialect, with the sole exceptions of: a) historical documents and monuments and b) works of belles-lettres" - the latter permitted only in Russian orthography and from a manuscript reviewed by the censorship[10]. Under the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR of 7 May 1919 on removing from squares and streets the monuments erected to tsars and tsarist minions, two of the three inscriptions were knocked off the pedestal; the remaining one was ordered removed by Hrynko, chairman of the Kyiv gubernia executive committee - academician Yefremov recorded this in his diary on 6 February 1925 - and in the end the side plaques were replaced with blank ones, while "Bohdan Khmelnytskyi 1888" was carved on the front stone[8].
In 1911 the Russian Empire erected a monument to princess Olha in Kyiv - on a site the city had allotted two years earlier for a monument to Shevchenko. In May 1909, the Kyiv city duma allotted the square on Mykhailivska Square for a monument to Taras Shevchenko[11]. Zilov, the trustee of the Kyiv educational district, wrote confidentially to governor-general Trepov that Shevchenko should not be placed opposite a "Russian governmental institution" and that "it would be necessary to erect a monument to one of the figures of Russian history"[11]. Out of this letter grew the program of the "historical path": on 7 April 1910, colonel Steletsky, secretary of the Kyiv section of the Imperial Russian Military-Historical Society, submitted a memorandum with a queue of eight monuments - princess Olha, Oleh, Yaroslav, Volodymyr, Volodymyr Monomakh, Sviatoslav, "prehistoric Kyiv" and Nestor the chronicler[11]. On 15 March 1911, the duma, with 68 of 72 councilors present, gave the society the site between St. Sophia Cathedral and St. Michael's Monastery - 46 votes against 22 - and at the same session overturned its own decision of 1909, moving the site of the future Shevchenko monument to the Karavaivska intersection: 41 against 24[11]. At first the duma rejected the concrete design as insufficiently "artistically monumental," and a month later permitted only a temporary model to be put up[11] - that is, they agreed to place a makeshift on the seized site, so long as it was occupied. The monument was unveiled on 4 September 1911: princess Olha in the center, to the left the apostle Andrew pointing at the Kyiv hills, to the right the seated Cyril and Methodius[12][13]. The model was sculpted by Ivan Kavaleridze and Petro Snitkin, the architect was Valerian Rykov, and the project was led by the sculptor Fedir Balavensky[14]; the historian Ihor Hyrych notes the paradox - the author of the imperial monument turned out to be "one of the 'Ukrainomaniacs' - a future outstanding sculptor and film director, and then a beginning artist, Ivan Kavaleridze"[15]. Cast on the pedestal was: "A Gift of the Sovereign Emperor to the City of Kyiv. In the Year of Our Lord 1911" - the tsar's cabinet did indeed give ten thousand rubles for the monument, and the Kyiv merchant Mohylevsky contributed another thousand[12][11]. Below, on the pedestal of the princess herself, stood: "She was the first from Rus to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; her the sons of Rus praise as their initiator"[12] - the baptism of Rus was being written into the imperial genealogy right on the stone. In 1919 the statue was thrown off its pedestal and buried, split in two, beneath the monument itself; in March 1923 the remaining figures were removed, and in March 1926 the communal department of Kyiv ordered the concrete cleared away for good[12][11]. In 1996 the statue was dug out from under the flowerbed and the monument was recreated from the old sketches, this time in marble[14].
The Russian Empire erected in Kyiv the largest monument to Alexander II in the entire empire. The gratitude on the pedestal was voiced not by Ukraine and not by Kyiv but by the "Southwestern Krai" - the empire's official name for the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro[16]. The monument, by the Italian sculptor Ximenes, was unveiled on 30 August 1911 on Tsarskaya Square, between the entrance to the Merchants' Garden and the building of the Merchants' Assembly; the unveiling was timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom and held in the presence of emperor Nicholas II, the Bulgarian tsar Ferdinand and prime minister Stolypin, who two days later, on the evening of 1 September, was mortally wounded in the Kyiv theater[17]. The money for the monument was raised by an all-Russian subscription, 200 thousand rubles[18]. The central pedestal bore the coat of arms of the empire, the double-headed eagle, and the inscription "To the Tsar-Liberator, the grateful Southwestern Krai. The year 1911"; on the lower pedestal was a bas-relief of peasants giving thanks for the abolition of serfdom[18]. The krai comprised the Kyiv, Volyn and Podillia governorates[16], which after the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 were merged into the Kyiv governorate-general (1832-1914), whose task, according to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, "consisted in the liquidation of the political, socio-ethnic and cultural distinctions of the krai and the intensification of the russification of its elite - the szlachta"[19]. The monument joined a row: the Kyiv Nicholas I (1896), Alexander III (1909), Alexander II (1911), Stolypin (1912) - the historian Ihor Hyrych calls this the pre-revolutionary monument boom and adds that the erection of the monument to princess Olha and the planned subsequent monuments were handled by the Kyiv section of the Imperial Russian Military-Historical Society, nine-tenths of which consisted of officers of the Kyiv military district, and its secretary, colonel Steletsky, in a memorandum to the governor-general of 7 April 1910, laid out the queue of future sculptures - from Olha and Oleh to Nestor the chronicler[15]. Hyrych sums up the outcome of those same years thus: in that time the Ukrainians put forward one monument, to Shevchenko, and were not allowed to erect it, while their opponents managed to put up "at least half a dozen monuments asserting Russianness and negating the Ukrainian national idea"[15].
The sign of the new order goes up within the very first weeks: Soviet troops took Lviv on 22 September 1939[20], and already in October, in the city center, on the islet in the middle of today's Svobody Avenue, rose the monument to the Stalin Constitution - a huge vertical composition of columns entwined with red banners, on a wooden frame, with five sculptural groups (a Red Army soldier, a worker, a mother with a child, a female student, and an old Hutsul with a boy) and inscriptions in Ukrainian, Polish and Yiddish symbolizing the "friendship of peoples" according to the articles of the Stalin constitution[21][22]. The sign has named authors: the sculptor Serhii Lytvynenko and the Kyiv artist Mykhailo Dmytrenko, who arrived in Lviv in 1939 in the "landing party" of Soviet artists whose task was the implantation of socialist realism; possibly the authors merely adapted to the site a design produced in Moscow, and it was executed by the sculptors Yevhen Dzyndra and Andrii Koverko[21]. The monument stood until 30 June 1941 and vanished with the arrival of the Germans[21].
The jubilee was fixed with a material sign in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, on the very square where the rada had taken place in 1654. The sign went up in the course of the jubilee reconstruction of the town ordered by the republic's authorities: "in connection with the preparation for the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia," the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR allocated 20 million rubles for the reconstruction of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, the reconstruction plan was developed under the direction of the architect Volodymyr Zabolotnyi, and in May 1954, "on the square where the historic Pereiaslav Rada took place (now Reunification Square), an obelisk with a memorial plaque was erected"[23]. On the plaque, beneath a relief of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a text is cast: "On this square, on 8 (18) January 1654, the Pereiaslav Rada took place, which, expressing the will of the Ukrainian people, unanimously adopted the historic decision on the reunification of Ukraine with Russia"[24]. The sign did not merely mark the spot: it declared the decision unanimous and expressive of the people's will, fixing this version in bronze on the very square where it all happened.
The material sign of the "merging of nations" was erected in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, the city of the Pereiaslav Rada: "on 8 October 1961, a majestic monument in honor of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia was unveiled on B. Khmelnytsky Square"[23]. The authorities unveiled the sign themselves: according to the newsreel Radianska Ukraina No. 49, the opening rally was addressed by Petro Shelest, first secretary of the Kyiv obkom of the CPU, and Pankratov, a secretary of the Moscow obkom of the party - the metropole spoke at the unveiling in its own voice[25]. The composition consisted of two female figures representing Ukraine and Russia and three bas-reliefs with medallions: "a torch, 1654; a hammer and sickle in the rays of the sun, 1917; the Order of Victory, 1945"[26]. The sign's purpose is recorded in its own protection passport: "The monument is a symbol of the eternal, unbreakable friendship and the indestructible monolithic unity of the fraternal peoples - Ukrainian and Russian…"[27]. Four years after the unveiling, the sign was taken under state protection by the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR of 21 July 1965 No. 711 "On the approval of the list of monuments of art, history and archaeology of the Ukrainian SSR"[28][29]. The pedestal bore the inscription "Forever together - forever with the Russian people"; in early December 2021 it was removed by unknown persons[30], and the monument itself was dismantled on 7 July 2022 - by an order of the Ministry of Culture that struck the monument, protection No. 5894-Ko, off the register "due to the loss of the subject of protection"[31].
From April 2022 the Russian occupation administrations marked the seized territories with imperial signs - in stone and on paper. In Kherson oblast more than 110 Lenin monuments had been dismantled before the invasion, with practically none left; after the occupation the invaders erected ten new ones: the first in Henichesk in April 2022 - the first Lenin monument on Ukrainian territory since 2014 - and at the end of that same month a monument was returned to its pedestal by the city council in Nova Kakhovka[32]. In Mariupol on 5 May 2022 a monument to a woman with a red flag was unveiled, and the ceremony was published in his Telegram channel by Andrei Turchak, secretary of the general council of "United Russia"; the Square of the Warrior-Liberators, named in honor of those who freed the city from the Nazis, was given back its Soviet name of "Lenin Komsomol Square" by the occupiers[33]. In parallel the occupation administration papered the territory with banners: in Kherson and Nova Kakhovka hung Russian-language billboards reading "Russia is here forever!," "Kherson - forever with Russia," "Kherson is a Russian city," and for them they bought, for twenty cents on a stock-photo site, a picture by the Ukrainian photographer Anna Pasichnyk - her son Yaroslav with a friend in vyshyvankas in a rapeseed field near Kyiv - painting a Russian flag in behind the children's backs[34]. In Balakliia in Kharkiv oblast the occupiers pasted over a city banner: first they hung "Ukraine and Russia are 'one'" on top of it, then a poster with a tricolor reading "We are one people with Russia!". On 10 September 2022 Ukrainian soldiers tore the tricolor down - and beneath it emerged the lines of Shevchenko that had stood there through the entire occupation: "Fight - and you shall prevail! God is helping you! Truth is with you, glory is with you, and holy freedom!"[35]. The signs held only until de-occupation: on 11 November 2022, a "Russia is here forever" poster in liberated Bilozerka in the Kherson region was torn down by local residents - the video was published by the Telegram channel "Nikolaevsky Vanek"[36].