Tracing the transformation of the historical politics in Ukraine starting with the “Orange revolution” till nowadays, the author addresses the case of the once richest Soviet republic to reveal the causes and the accompanying risks related to the penetration of national populism into memorial legislation. Works by E. Laclau who discusses populism not as distorted democracy, but as a way of constructing the political, serve as a theoretical framework of the discussion. The sourced used in the current research consist of legislative acts, mass media material, memoirs, and materials produced by official institutions responsible for the memorial politics in Ukraine. The author concludes that the sector of memorial legislation is highly vulnerable to the “virus” of national populism in the context of societal crisis, since “memory laws” exist primarily on the level of political symbolism rather than rational discourse.