Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy day of repentance and atonement, fell on September 29 in 1941. This same day, the execution of more than 33,771 Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine began at Babyn Yar. The bloodshed would come to be known as one of the most tragic events in Kyiv’s history.
Eighty years after the Nazi massacres that left nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews dead, Ukraine is still struggling to decide how best to remember the tragedy of Babyn Yar. One private proposal for a memorial center that includes Russian investors has provoked the wrath of some Ukrainians.
Mainstream Russian TV outlets initially commiserated with the U.S. after news broke about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, as media came more under the Kremlin's control, conspiracy theories began to replace the facts.
The centuries-old town of Sebezh sits near the borders of both Belarus and Latvia in Russia's western Pskov region. Residents are proud of their well-preserved old houses and rich history, but they've seen little development in a struggling town that was once called the "window to Europe."
Since Ukraine opened its Soviet-era KGB archives in 2015, the public has been able to dig into the files and uncover many dark secrets of the past. But for some, the harsh revelations have been too much to handle as they learn that their relatives were secret police informants or agents.
In tsarist Russia, it was a women's prison, but now it's home for poor families with nowhere else to go. Although it's supposed to be temporary accommodation, residents spend years amid its crumbling, ill-lit corridors, waiting for permanent housing.
As Belarus faces international isolation for its brutal crackdown on opposition voices, it has been able to rely on Russia for support -- both political and economic. Despite a sometimes fraught relationship, Moscow has been pouring money into Belarus since the 1990s.
The mysterious deaths of nine Soviet hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959 has inspired many movies and documentaries. To this day, journalists and tourists come to Russia's Sverdlovsk region to follow the expedition's route and reach the infamous Dyatlov Pass.
City authorities have refused to approve a public exhibition marking the centenary of the late Russian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov.
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, hundreds of thousands of children from hard-hit areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia spent summer vacations in the West to get away, even for a short time, from the irradiated region. Among them: today's Belarusian opposition leader, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
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