Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has apologized for the fact that an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed after entering Russian airspace in Grozny, Chechnya on Wednesday, but did not say that Russia was responsible.

Putin said Saturday that Russia’s air defense systems were active when the plane attempted to land in Grozny, according to the Kremlin. Unable to reach the airport, the aircraft diverted east, eventually crashing near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 people on board.

People from Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were on board the plane. Among the survivors were two children.

Putin “apologized for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace” in a phone call with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The Kremlin said that the plane “repeatedly attempted to land at the airport in Grozny” but at the same time, the areas of “Grozny, Mozdok and Vladikavkaz were attacked by Ukrainian combat drones, and Russian air defense systems repelled these attacks.”

Russia’s investigative committee has opened a criminal case in relation to the disaster, the statement said.

Video and images of the plane after it crashed show perforations in its body that look similar to damage from shrapnel or debris. The cause of these holes has not been confirmed.

Azerbaijan’s Aliyev told Putin that the plane “encountered external physical and technical interference while in Russian airspace, resulting in a complete loss of control,” according to an official presidential statement about Saturday’s call.

Aliyev said that Azerbaijani authorities had examined holes in the plane’s fuselage, reviewed passenger and crew members’ injuries from “foreign particles penetrating the cabin mid-flight” and heard survivors’ testimonies.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on X that he also spoke to Aliyev on Saturday, and conveyed his condolences regarding the “tragic crash.”

“Russia must provide clear explanations and stop spreading disinformation. Photos and videos clearly show the damage to the aircraft’s fuselage, including punctures and dents, which strongly point to a strike by an air defense missile,” Zelensky said.

At least five airlines have temporarily suspended flights to areas in Russia since the disaster, including Azerbaijan Airlines, Turkmenistan Airlines, El Al Israel, Flydubai and Qazaq Air.

Most of those airlines cited safety concerns when announcing the suspensions.

South Jeolla province Fire Service Headquarters said that number is expected to grow as recovery operations continue.

The Jeju Air jetliner was carrying 175 passengers and six crew when it crashed on landing at the airport in Muan county, just after 9 a.m. local time Sunday (7 p.m. ET Saturday).

Emergency responders said they had rescued two people from the plane, according to the fire department.

Rescue workers are focusing on reaching people inside the tail section of the plane.

Images of the crash published by the Yonhap news agency showed only the tail section of the plane intact, surrounded by flames.

According to the fire department, the accident was caused by a landing gear malfunction.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Kenyan President William Ruto has promised to stop abductions of government critics, in an apparent change of stance for a leader who has previously called the wave of disappearances “fake news.”

Ruto, his government officials and police have maintained for months that there were no abductions. Ruto has also demanded names of the missing from families, and told parliament that the reports were fabricated to tarnish his government’s name. At least 82 government critics have allegedly gone missing after a youth-led protest movement erupted in June against a controversial finance bill, though some have resurfaced.

Ruto’s remarks on Saturday did not acknowledge government culpability for those missing, however. The Kenyan leader also said that parents should better “take care” of their children.

“What has been said about abductions, we will stop them so Kenyan youth can live in peace, but they should have discipline and be polite so that we can build Kenya together,” Ruto said at a stadium in Homa Bay, in the west of the country.

Among the disappeared are two young men who shared AI-generated images of Ruto in a casket that some considered offensive and a popular cartoonist whose images of the president went viral. Despite Ruto’s speech, a state-funded human rights body says 29 people remain unaccounted for, including six people who disappeared days before Christmas.

Human rights defenders allege that all of the missing activists and critics are believed to have been tracked down by government intelligence who tapped into phone signals. The protests were widely mobilized online, before they spread onto the streets.

Human rights activist Bob Njagi, who said he was abducted this summer, reacted to Ruto’s comment: “It was an admission that they’re happening under their watch, if not by them.”

Njagi leads the Free Kenya Movement, which he described as a consortium of organizations united in pursuit of change for the country. He was one of the most prominent figures behind the protests against Ruto’s government before he disappeared.

Njagi said that he was driven to an undisclosed location, stripped naked and chained to the floor for the first two days of his detention. He said that Kenyan security officers held him incommunicado, handcuffed and blindfolded in solitary confinement for 30 more days but was released after a judge threatened to jail the police chief for not revealing his whereabouts.

“They’re Kenyan security officers who took us because they told me we had become a threat to the state. These men would just give us one meal a day – ugali (cornmeal) and cabbage or beans,” he said.

Until President Ruto’s comments, the Kenyan government has always denied that anyone was missing. “Social media has been used to perpetuate the narrative that certain lawful arrests were abductions when, in fact, those arrested were either awaiting trial or have been released after necessary legal procedures,” Chief Minister Musalia Mudavadi said last week.

Njagi said that he was never formally questioned, “but the guys who brought us food would ask random questions, like, ‘who’s been funding you?’ and who our associates were.”

The detention was excruciating for many reasons, he said, including that he couldn’t communicate with his family. Njagi was expecting a daughter. She was born nine days before he was released.

Njagi is now reunited with his now three-month-old daughter. But others like Gideon Kibet, a 24-year-old college student who drew the viral cartoon of Ruto, are still missing.

Kibet disappeared after meeting opposition senator Okiya Omtatah on Christmas Eve.

Kibet’s younger brother Ronny Kiplangat, who is also still missing, had disappeared a few days earlier. The brothers’ family fears that security forces used Kiplangat as bait to lure Kibet – who was studying outside the capital – to Nairobi.

Omtatah said that both Njagi and Kibet were abducted by security forces after leaving his office.

“(Kibet) boarded a matatu after my driver dropped him off in the city center. As they have done with others, they must have blocked the matatu and snatched him from it,” he said.

“If you look at the attitude of the police, they know what is happening. The state is simply allowing it or acquiescing to it,” Omtatah said.

Like many young Kenyans, Kibet was once a fervent Ruto supporter. But he turned into a sharp critic as the euphoria that propelled Ruto to power has turned into disappointment with his government over corruption, unemployment, and an anemic economy.

Kibet is among many youth that voted for Ruto’s “hustler-in-chief” promise of a better future, but have soured on his government just two years in.

Twenty-two-year-old Peter Muteti Njeru was abducted from a suburb outside Nairobi last week.

Njeru had posted an AI-generated image of Ruto in a casket on social media, but deleted it after some commenters said it could amount to treason under Kenyan law.

CCTV footage from a shop in Njeru’s apartment building showed two men ambushing him before dragging him into a car that speeds off.

“Where do you draw the line between power and dictatorship?,” Njeru’s cousin Ansity Kendi Christine said in reference to the abduction.

Christine, who says their whole family voted for Ruto, added: “It’s a shame I will carry for the rest of my life.”

Kenya’s recently impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has claimed that a rogue unit of security officers outside of the command of the police was carrying out abductions and killings in the country. Some youth who went out to protest and disappeared were later found dead.

“Your guess is as good as mine as to who is the commander of that unit,” he told reporters, demanding that it be dismantled.

Gachagua hinted that his former boss and running mate Ruto was ultimately responsible after Kenya’s police chief denied involvement in the disappearances.

“For the avoidance of doubt, the National Police Service is not involved in any abduction, and there is no police station in the country that is holding the reported abductees,” Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja said in a statement last week.

Omtatah has called on Kanja and Kenya’s chief detective to “come clean” on the abductions or quit.

Meanwhile, Ruto’s promise to stop the abductions can’t come soon enough for the families of the missing.

Retired civil servant Gerald Mwangi, whose son has been missing since Saturday, is hoping Ruto will keep his word.

Billy Mwangi, 24, disappeared from his barbershop’s doorstep the day after a now suspended X account believed to belong to him, posted a doctored photo showing Ruto’s head emerging from a casket.

Mwangi’s father hopes his son will be released after Ruto’s announcement. In the meantime, he says, he is continuing what he calls a “layman’s investigation” into his son’s disappearance.

Civil society groups and professional bodies have condemned the abductions, calling them enforced disappearances with the regional cartoonists society decrying a return to the “dark days of censorship, detention without trial, torture and murder of voices critical of the government.”

And, while a civilian-led police oversight body is investigating, many Kenyans have little faith in their independence.

“We believe in God and I believe that my son is going to be released,” Mwangi said.

Olha Mesheryakova doesn’t know what the next year will bring for her life in the capital of war-torn Ukraine, for her family or her business. She is confident, however, that in 2025 she will attend a dozen performances in the theaters of Kyiv. The thought gives her a sense of hope.

“This creates a certain expectation, gives a kind of structure, great support at a time when the world around me has gone crazy, and I know exactly what I’m going to do on December 23, for example, because I bought tickets in the summer. Honestly, it gives me hope and faith in the future. It’s some kind of magic,” said Mesheryakova, an entrepreneur.

She is far from alone in her passion for theater. To get tickets to a popular performance, she, along with thousands of other Ukrainians, has to hunt for them months in advance.

On a blacked-out street in the center of Kyiv in mid-December, cars move slowly, as hundreds of people descend on the small, historic building of the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, located just a few hundred meters below the presidential residence.

Since the theater reopened six months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, it has been packed almost every day.

Over that time, the theater itself, its actors and its audience have changed. Its director, Yevhen Nyshchuk, volunteered in the military in 2022, as did many of his colleagues. For example, all three actors who played the main roles in “Three Comrades,” adapted from the post-World War I novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, ended up at the front and were able to return to the stage only a year later.

Nyshchuk felt this altered appreciation for Remarque’s writing so keenly in part because he and his colleagues continued to serve in the Armed Forces. To perform the plays, they received permission from their command to take short leaves.

Since the war began, the Ivan Franko Drama Theater has staged more than 1,500 performances attended by more than half a million spectators. Seventeen plays have been premiered. One of them is “The Witch of Konotop,” a mystical play that explores themes of love and power. Tickets were sold out in minutes for the entire run and many Ukrainians have joined a waitlist for any that become available.

Its director, Ivan Uryvskyi, said he was astonished by the play’s success and the influx of new theater-goers.

Uryvskyi says not all come to the theater to escape from the sad reality of war. It is often the opposite.

“Someone needs to plunge into the present day and understand themselves. And he/she doesn’t need to go to a comedy, they don’t need to be distracted. He needs some serious dialogue. Maybe he needs to cry it out in the theater,” said Urivskyi.

Even if people want to escape from the war, they often cannot, as performances are regularly interrupted by air raid sirens. The audience has to leave the theater building and take shelter at the nearest metro station. If the danger passes within an hour, the performance resumes. Otherwise, the show continues on another day.

Both new plays and those that have been in the theater’s repertoire for years get loud applause from the audience.

“When people applaud for 10 to 20 minutes, they give some part of their applause to the artists for the performance, and looking at each other they give another part to themselves, for the fact that, for example, today everyone survived a missile attack of more than 120 missiles and more than 100 drones, and in the evening they came to the performance, which was not canceled,” Nyshchuk said.

A thriving book scene

The number of bookstores in Ukraine has increased from 200 pre-war to almost 500 now. The largest of them, Sens, opened on Kyiv’s main street in the midst of the war. Offering over 57,000 books, it is crowded at any time of the day and says it had more than half a million customers this year. The store’s event plan is scheduled for months in advance.

For its founder, Oleksiy Erinchak, the launch of such a large-scale project in wartime seemed logical. He began the war as the owner of a small bookstore, opened on the eve of the invasion. It became a volunteer hub in the first months of the conflict and grew so popular that Erinchak started thinking about a new, larger space. Meanwhile, the book market and the needs of the audience had changed due to the impact of the war.

According to the Ukrainian Book Institute, the number of adult Ukrainians reading books every day has doubled during the war to 16%.

“Maybe it’s just war, or stress, and a person just hides under the covers, under the bed, opens a book and travels to other worlds to get away from it all. Or not traveling to other worlds, but delving deeper to understand why did this happen in our lifetime? And books actually have many answers, and you can feel them, understand them, and feel better,” Erinchak explained.

He argues that the current popularity of books should be maintained in the future.

“Local culture always flourishes during wartime… If people are bringing money to the Ukrainian bookstore, it means that we need to invest this money further in Ukrainian books, in Ukrainian culture,” he said, which in turn will help build resilience to future potential Russian disinformation. “We need to build this foundation in our book and cultural sphere as strongly as possible and build a semantic shield around it, a dome so that it would be much more difficult for others to break in and influence the minds of Ukrainians.”

Songs in the shelters

A few songs before the end of an anniversary concert this fall by one of the most popular Ukrainian bands, Okean Elzy, an air raid was announced in Kyiv.

Part of the audience went down to the subway to take shelter, joined by the band. There, on the subway stairs, the performance resumed, with a speaker instead of a professional sound system, with only guitars – and hundreds of voices singing along to every hit.

“Okean Elzy’s 30th-anniversary concerts are a mirror of our history. We have been together for 30 years: at big concerts and in shelters, in stadiums and in dugouts… But it’s not the place that matters, it’s our togetherness,” the band later posted on their Instagram account.

In the almost three years since the full-scale invasion, Okean Elzy’s frontman Svyatoslav Vakarchuk has performed more than 300 concerts for the military, including at positions near the front lines. In some videos posted on the band’s social media pages, what sounds like artillery fire can be heard while Vakarchuk sings for the military. Okean Elzy has donated almost 280 million UAH ($6.7 million) to the Defence Forces of Ukraine, a spokesperson for the band said.

The Ivan Franko Drama Theater also regularly organizes charity performances and says it has already raised more than $1.2 million for the Armed Forces. Additionally, it offers its stage to troupes that have lost their theaters to Russian occupation or can no longer perform in them due to adverse security conditions.

The vibrant cultural life in cities to the rear contrasts with the situation in the frontline areas of Ukraine, where Russia keeps seizing territory.

Yegor Firsov, a chief sergeant who has been fighting against the Russians since 2022, says he is generally sympathetic to an active cultural life, even if some of those on the front lines may be fighting in “real hell.”

And on those rare days when Firsov manages to come to Kyiv from the front, he too goes to concerts.

“Culture is a part of our lives, it is both about war and partly about leisure, because even we, military men, need mental healing, need to be distracted, to be resilient.”