Rare footage of Ukrainian flag being raised over Lviv City Hall found in Dutch archives
Previously unknown professional footage showing the Ukrainian flag being raised over Lviv City Hall in April 1990, more than a year before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, has been discovered in a Dutch television archive.
Dutch journalist Renske ten Veen found the 20-minute report while working on De Schatkamer, a project making material from Dutch television archives publicly accessible, Bridge Media told hromadske.
The footage was shot by a Dutch television crew that traveled to Lviv in April 1990 to report on the People's Movement of Ukraine, or Rukh, for the television program Diogenes.
Instead, the journalists found themselves documenting a historic moment.
Their footage captures mass street protests, a closed meeting of Lviv's Writers' Union and an interview with Yakov Pohrebnyak, then first secretary of the Communist Party's regional committee.
It also shows the newly elected Lviv City Council voting to raise the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag over City Hall - and the moment the flag itself was raised.
At the time, Ukraine was still a Soviet republic. Lviv became the fourth Ukrainian city, after Stryi, Ternopil and Drohobych, to raise the national flag over a government building.
According to Bridge Media, no comparable high-quality professional footage of the event was previously known to exist.
The full Diogenes report has been preserved for 36 years in the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision television archive.
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