"Lenin is always alive, Lenin is always with you," sings a Soviet song. So he is. In Semenivka village, in the Chernihivska Oblast, a Lenin monument that had been toppled on February 26, 2014, has been restored.
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, local communists decided to restore and return it.
"The Lenin monument should certainly be dismantled," says the institute on its website. "Any other stance, decision, and action is a mockery of the memory of Ukrainian victims of the totalitarian regime."
Russia's Defense Ministry channel Zvezda has published an article titled: "(Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen) Avakov has appointed young 'Hitler' to head Lviv police."
Yuriy Zozula, 26-year old former Maidan activist, has "looks strikingly similar to Adolf Hitler," Zvezda wrote.
Corporal Zozula is one of the best Kyiv police officers now, according to Avakov. Officers from the newly reformed city police force will begin patrolling the streets of Lviv on August 23.
His hairstyle, similar to that of old-school Ukrainian Cossacks, has become fashionable among young Ukrainians and is not believed to be connected to Hitler.
The list of Ukrainian military men who died in a Russian-backed ambush in Ilovaysk that was published today on the Prosecutor General’s Office website has been removed.
“We don’t have this list on the website and now, unfortunately, we know nothing,” RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service was told by the prosecutor-general's press office.
Earlier this morning, the list was published on the website and shared on the Facebook page of military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios. Three hundred and sixty-six Ukrainians were reported dead after the battle, 157 of them remained unidentified.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that a consultation led by experts from Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France was successful.
"I can tell you that, a few minutes ago, expert negotiations in Berlin ended. We showed a common position with the EU about Ukraine’s implementation of the Minsk agreement. As far as I was informed, the negotiations were successful,” Poroshenko told journalists.
The experts were discussing various aspects of constitutional amendments in Ukraine.
Since the Ukraine crisis erupted last year, Poland has been one of Kyiv's staunchest supporters in the EU. I guess that matters not a jot to some soccer fans:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been commenting on the August 24 meeting of the Ukrainian, French and German presidents that was announced as a Normandy group meeting without its fourth member -- Russia.
Lavrov emphasized that it is not going to be a meeting of the Normandy group, merely a trilateral meeting of Ukraine, France, and Germany.
“We are closely following the preparations for this meeting. Likewise, we will closely watch how it ends. We strongly believe that Kyiv needs an additional prod to persuade it that the arrangements and commitments made in Minsk on February 12 must be complied with,” said Lavrov.
The minister was then asked if he would call this trilateral meeting "disciplinary to a certain degree."
“I hope that this will be the case,” Lavrov answered.