The five have ties to a Ukrainian nationalist organization that has been pushing the removal of all Soviet monuments from the country, police said.
They are accused of climbing up the statue with a ladder and damaging it with a sledgehammer.
Police said the 1950s-era statue, which occupies a prominent position on Kiev's well-known Shevchenko Boulevard, would be torn down.
The attack comes amid a rash of attacks on statues of the Bolshevik leader.
On April 1, a towering bronze Lenin statue was badly damaged when a bomb exploded near the St. Petersburg train station where he gave a speech upon returning from exile in April 1917, months before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Nobody was injured in the incident on the square near Finlandsky Station, which occurred at about 4:30 a.m., but the explosion blew a gaping whole into Lenin's posterior.(AP, MT)
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