The Berlin administrative court has revoked the ban on displaying the Ukrainian flag in the German capital around major Soviet monuments on May 8 and 9, commemorating Germany's liberation from Nazism in 1945.
This decision follows the police ban issued on Friday for both the Russian and Ukrainian flags, which had sparked angry protests at the Ukrainian embassy and criticism from German politics.
The police had prohibited the display of both flags and other symbols "to ensure the protection of the Soviet commemorative monuments" in Treptow, Tiergarten and Schönholzer Heide, which each year attracts numerous visitors on this date.
Veterans of World War II, diplomats, as well as representatives and delegations of states that participated in the commemorative acts on behalf of the countries directly involved in the liberation of Nazi Germany were exempt from the ban.
The Alliance of Ukrainian Organizations in Berlin appealed urgently against this measure, which it considered "sends the wrong political signals, by equating the national symbols of Ukraine with the symbolism of the war of Russian annihilation and thus legitimizing them."
A German citizen of Ukrainian descent also filed her own appeal to the Administrative Court against the police action.
The monument to the Soviet army in the Tiergarten, in the vicinity of the emblematic Brandenburg Gate, as well as the Treptow park, usually gather thousands of people on Capitulation Day to pay tribute to the 80,000 Soviets who fell in the battle of Berlin.
Some 7,000 of those fallen soldiers lie in Treptow Park, who are remembered with an imposing 30-meter-high statue of a Soviet soldier crushing a swastika with his sword.
The Berlin police already banned the display of Ukrainian or Russian flags at fifteen hot spots last year to avoid provocations on the date of May 8, which commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany in Germany.
The Capitulation of the Third Reich was signed in Karlshorst, on the outskirts of the capital, on the night of May 8-9, 1945, a few days after the suicide in their bunker of Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, on April 30. .
