There's Now A Statue Of Darth Vader Standing Outside A Ukrainian Factory

There's also a Wi-Fi router in its head, because this is the future we wanted.

By
Hayes Brown
by Hayes Brown

BuzzFeed World News Editor

Russia is not too popular in Ukraine these days — what with the whole situation in the east and all — and thus statues of Vladimir Lenin and other communist icons are out of fashion.

dumskaya.net

This particular statue used to be outside of a factory in the city of Yuzhne, outside Odessa, the Ukrainian website Dumskaya reports. We say "used to" because thanks to a law passed in March ordering the "de-Communization" of Ukraine, the statue was due to be torn down.

BUT WAIT. Rather than tear down the statue, Ukrainian artist Alexander Milov — who built this piece at Burning Man this year — saw ~opportunity~. In the dark materials of Lenin, he had a vision of a place far, far away, from a long time ago.

View this video on YouTube
youtube.com

The result is this magnificent piece of work. Oh, and by the way, it's more machine than man at this point — it reportedly has a Wi-Fi router installed inside the head.

dumskaya.net

"Everything flows, everything changes, in place of the old characters come new, and so the world turns," said Semyen Gorbunov, the man who installed the refurbished statue.

This isn't the first run-in with the Dark Lord of the Sith inside of Ukraine in recent years. A man calling himself Darth Alekseyevich Vader ran for president with the Ukrainian Internet Party last year.

Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty Images

He was struck down in the polls, but he has not — to our knowledge — become more powerful than we could possibly imagine.

CORRECTION

Dumskaya is a Ukrainian website. A previous version of this story incorrectly labeled it as a Russian website.

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