Russian and international news agencies quote Ukrainian authorities as saying that masked men have toppled several more statues of Soviet leader V.I. Lenin in eastern Ukraine in a fresh show of anti-Russian sentiment as Kyiv battles pro-Moscow separatists.
Two statues were demolished at universities in the government-controlled city of Kharkiv late Friday, a week after the parliament approved a bill banning Soviet symbols in Ukraine.
The law, which also bans Nazi symbols, has yet to be signed into law by President Petro Poroshenko.
On April 17, the pro-Kyiv governor's office in Luhansk, an eastern region partly split between the government and separatists, said another Lenin statue had been daubed in yellow and blue, Ukraine's national colors, and later toppled in the village of Stanytsya Luhanska.
Authorities in a government-controlled part of another contested region, Donetsk, also said unidentified people used cables to tug down a Lenin statue in the city of Kramatorsk on April 17.
That concludes our live blogging for Saturday, April 18. Follow our continuing coverage of events in Ukraine and throughout RFE/RL's broadcast region here.
Great quote from Joseph Brodsky: "The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most. When it's more than that, it invariably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging wars or internal terror, or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, resorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalise himself by doing something horrendous."
Here's the tweet that shows the Russian deputy PM in Svalbard, Norway:
Latvia's military spotted a kilo-class (large) Russian sub patrolling near its waters today.
h/t: @liveuamap
But kudos to his Russian adversary for even showing up, frankly. Tough crowd.
Interfax reports a gruesome apparent killing of a police captain in the Lviv region:
Police in the Lviv region have launched a criminal inquiry into the death of a police captain as a result of "being dragged by horses" on a road....
The Radekhovsky police officers investigating the circumstances around the policeman's death have established the crime scene and suspects: a 53-year-old resident of the Radekhovsky district and a 26-year-old resident of the Sokolsky district.
The police also found that the horses dragged the victim's body over a 13-kilometer distance.