On 29 July 2023, amidst the removal of the Soviet heraldry from the monument, the director of the memorial complex Yuri Savchuk announced that it would be renamed to Mother Ukraine,[5] yet as of now no official decision by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications had been made.

Instead, according to legend, in the 1970s, a group of Communist Party officials and Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich looked across at the hills by the Lavra and decided the panorama needed a war memorial.

[citation needed] However, after Vuchetich died in 1974, the design of the memorial was substantially reworked, and only the eyes and eyebrows remained from the original face.

In 2023 Ukrainian TV channel 1+1 interviewed the grandson of Vasyl Borodai who presented them with the original projects of the statue.

When Director of Construction Ivan Petrovich was asked to confirm the cost of 9 million rubles, he responded that this was a conservative estimate.

Financial shortages mean that the flame, which uses up to 400 m3 (14,000 cu ft) of gas per hour, can only burn on the most prominent national holidays, and rumours persist that the statue is built on unstable foundations, something vehemently denied by the Kyiv city government.

[19][20] On 13 July 2023, the DIAM urban planning agency announced that the Soviet state emblem would be replaced with the Ukrainian trident coat of arms.

It was completed on schedule despite the crew facing problems of intense wind, heavy rain and Russian air raids.

[29] The War Museum stated that the actual results of the inspection didn't show any signs of corrosion, instead there were only minor defects which the institute agreed to fix.

[30] 10 October museum's press service informed that Paton Institute fixed all the minor defects, finishing the decommunization process, according to their latest inspection the welds now meet all the requirements of regulatory documentation.

[31] A scene in the 2006 novel World War Z depicts a Ukrainian tank commander and his surviving men fleeing in their vehicles from an abandoned and burning Kyiv under the watchful gaze of the monument.