Five people were detained Tuesday on suspicion of smashing the face and cutting off an arm of a statue of Vladimir Lenin prominently displayed in Kiev, police said.

The five have ties to a Ukrainian nationalist organization that has been pushing the removal of all Soviet monuments from the country, police said.

They are accused of climbing up the statue with a ladder and damaging it with a sledgehammer.

Police said the 1950s-era statue, which occupies a prominent position on Kiev's well-known Shevchenko Boulevard, would be torn down.

The attack comes amid a rash of attacks on statues of the Bolshevik leader.

On April 1, a towering bronze Lenin statue was badly damaged when a bomb exploded near the St. Petersburg train station where he gave a speech upon returning from exile in April 1917, months before the Bolshevik Revolution.

Nobody was injured in the incident on the square near Finlandsky Station, which occurred at about 4:30 a.m., but the explosion blew a gaping whole into Lenin's posterior.(AP, MT)