Hot take but I bet they wouldn't have replaced it if somebody hadn't chosen to invade them

the US-backed (Operation Aerodynamic) reactionaries that go back to Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and OUN-B were itching for decades to divorce the Ukrainian nation from all pro-soviet and pro-working-class and pro-socialist iconography. The whole reason Donbass wants to separate from the West half of the country is they speak Russian, they were Russian before Khrushchev, and they've been getting ethnically cleansed in a civil war since 2014. A war that did not start with the annexation of Crimea, but in fact started with USA carrying out a barely concealed coup on behalf of Poroshenko, and pouring money into reactionary organizations who began ethnic cleansing. This conflict is not a simple mirror image of when the US does shit like invade Iraq. That's a very geopolitically illiterate interpretation that I see far too often. I think Americans are starting to ask "are we the baddies" and instead of answering in the affirmative, they desperately want a situation where they're the good guys, and they think they've found one with Russia and Ukraine. Problem is, that whole conflict has been set up as a pretense for escalation since the cold war. When Russian privatization slowed down under Putin (versus Yeltsin) the West saw that as a failure to fully become capitalist, and since then has been waging proxy wars against Russia, in Syria, in Georgia, now in Ukraine. Former soviet countries must be made to fight each other for the enrichment of the imperial core. The punishment for being Communist or even simply not Capitalist enough (i.e. having any kind of nationalized industries or natural resources, not allowing foreign direct investment, not taking IMF loans, attempting to compete with wealthier nations rather than simply be cheap labor of them) is to be balkanized, looted, and pitted against your regional neighbors.