Latvia toppled a towering Soviet-era monument commemorating the Red Army victory over Nazi Germany, the latest in a series of monuments that have been pulled down in Eastern Europe amid growing hostility toward Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine.
Workers brought down the 80-meter-high obelisk on August 25, eliciting cheers and applause from onlookers as it crashed into a nearby pond in downtown Riga.
Erected in 1985, the monument was intended to commemorate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, which occupied the Baltic states during World War II.
But for many Latvians it was an offensive reminder of the decades of oppressive occupation by the Soviet Union, which ended in 1991 when Latvia declared independence.
SEE ALSO: Estonia's Contentious Soviet MonumentsLatvia’s parliament voted to approve the demolition of the Victory Park monument in May, about three months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted alarm bells throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where memories of the Soviet-imposed communist regimes remain painful.
Ethnic Russians make up about 25 percent of Latvia's population.
There was no immediate reaction to the monument's demolition from Moscow.
In the past, Russian officials have reacted angrily to any suggestion that it, or other similar monuments, might be demolished. In 2007, when Estonia removed a similar World War II monument from the center of Tallinn, the city was rocked by violent riots, and the country suffered a massive cyberattack that was later blamed on Russian hackers.
A day earlier, workers in the southwestern Polish town of Brzeg began demolishing a Soviet war memorial there, the 24th to be brought down in Poland since March.
Estonia's government last week also started removing a Soviet World War II monument from a city near the Russian border.