MOSCOW (Reuters) – One of Russia’s largest book publishers and the country’s biggest bookstore chain said on Friday they were dropping two prominent Russian writers over their pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian comments.

Both authors made the comments in phone calls with people who they thought were senior Ukrainian officials. In reality, those were Russian video bloggers and comedians who have made a career out of publicly embarrassing the Kremlin’s foes.

Author Dmitry Bykov, in particular, said that although he regretted the killing of Russians in the Ukrainian conflict, he could not blame the Ukrainian leadership for that.

Bykov also told the comedian that if his biography of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was published in Ukraine, he would donate all proceedings to its armed forces.

Another author, Grigori Chkhartishvili, best known under pen name Boris Akunin, described Russia as a threat to the whole world and said he had no qualms about Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian cities.

Citing those comments, which have been publicised this week, publisher AST and bookstore chain Chitai-Gorod said in separate statements on Friday they would suspend the printing and sales, respectively, of books by Bykov and Chkhartishvili.

Both authors have earlier publicly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now live in the West but remain entitled to royalties from book sales in Russia.

Russia’s RBC news outlet quoted Bykov as saying book censorship was nothing new in Russia’s history and has never been effective.

“It is high time they understood that a book cannot be banned,” Bykov said.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

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