Four Arrested in Moscow at Memorial to Ukrainian Apartment Bombing Victims

Police in Moscow arrested four people on Tuesday for attending a spontaneous memorial to the Ukrainian civilians killed by a Russian missile strike on their apartment building in Dnipro.

Radio Free Europe (RFE) quoted human rights activists who said one of the detainees was “a woman who came to lay flowers with her dog.”

“The woman was forced into a car, and the dog was left on the street,” the report said. The woman’s neighbors rescued the dog.

The Dnipro strike took place on Saturday, when the Ukrainian military said a high-speed Russian missile with a 2,000-pound warhead slammed into a nine-story block of apartments, ripping the building in half. Search and rescue workers brought the death count up to 44 on Tuesday, five of them children.

Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, denounced the attack as a Russian war crime. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the strike as “another example of a suspected violation of war.” 

The small Dnipro memorial in Moscow – a photo of the bombed apartment building with some toys and flowers heaped around it – was created overnight at the feet of a famed statue of Larysa Petrivna Kosach, a beloved Ukrainian poet and essayist who wrote under the name “Lesya Ukrainka.”

Kosach, born in 1871, wrote about the natural beauty of her country in Ukrainian, during a time when Tsarist Russia was trying to stamp out Ukraine’s language and culture. She died in 1913 and was memorialized on a Ukrainian banknote. 

Her statue on Moscow’s Ukrainian Boulevard was meant to emphasize the closeness of latter-day Russia and Ukraine but, since the invasion, it has become a gathering place for Russians and Ukrainians in Moscow who are opposed to the war.

According to RFE, a group of Kremlin-supporting Muscovites called the police to break up the memorial. Among other things, hardcore Russian nationalists were irked that the memorial included posters with a crossed-out letter “Z” – a popular symbol of support for President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They also did not like the “colorful toys” left by mourners, because they were “considered LGBT symbolism.”

The Moscow Times reported that the memorial grew considerably in size after local residents noticed the flowers placed on Monday were being removed. The memorial was completely removed by Wednesday morning, and a busload of police officers was parked ominously near the Lesya Ukrainka statue to ensure it was not recreated.

The names of the detained individuals, and the charges against them, have not been released by Moscow police as of Wednesday morning. Criticizing Putin’s war in Ukraine is illegal in Russia, so they might be charged on that basis.