Editorial Position

You were looking for a travel guide and landed on an editorial explanation instead. That happens if you followed an old link or searched for a city in Russia, occupied Crimea, or Abkhazia. Itineraries, hotel roundups, and directions for getting there used to sit here. They are gone now. In this section we collect the pieces where the editorial team says plainly what it removed and why.

Most of the section goes back to a single decision. We took down every guide to Russia, occupied Crimea, and Abkhazia. Each piece in the section covers its own group of deleted pages and explains the decision as it applies to that group. That is why the headlines look alike while the subject of each one is different.

By city, these are pieces about Moscow and St. Petersburg, about Kazan, Sochi, and Adler, about Suzdal, Yaroslavl, Kolomna, Pskov, and Smolensk. There are separate explanations for Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg, Tula and Ryazan. We write separately about Yalta, Sevastopol, Yevpatoria, and Alushta. The range of content types is just as wide: guides to sights, palaces, cathedrals, and museums, city itineraries, seasonal pieces about Moscow in winter.

A large group of pieces deals with accommodation. These explain what happened to the hotel roundups for central Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Anapa, and Gelendzhik, to the Sochi hotels by the sea, with pools, and for families with children, to the sanatoriums of Adler and the Moscow region, and to the hotels of Abkhazia and Gagra. Another group is about getting there: how to reach Sochi and Abkhazia. There are also pieces on nature and leisure: Lake Baikal and the national parks, Krasnaya Polyana and Rosa Khutor, the wineries and parks of Crimea.

Every piece follows the same structure. It opens with a short statement of which pages were taken down and that this is an editorial decision, not a technical error. Then come the reasons and the sources we rely on. We name the source next to each claim and give the date it was checked. At the end we suggest where you could go instead and which pages on the site will help with planning. We name the downsides of the decision too: some readers lost useful practical pages.

The section is for anyone who came for a deleted guide and wants to understand what happened. It is also useful if you care about the principles the editorial team works by. There is no practical information here about trips to these places. We do not give addresses, timetables, accommodation roundups, or itineraries for these destinations. If that is the kind of content you need, this section will not help you, and we are telling you so up front.

Start with the piece about the place or topic you were searching for. The city or content type comes first in the headline, so the right page is easy to spot in the list. You do not need to read everything in order. The reasons behind the decision are shared, and one or two pieces are enough to see the whole logic. The rest are worth opening only if you are interested in a particular city or a particular group of roundups.

"Editorial Position" sits at the top level of the site and has no subsections. It exists apart from the guide sections and does not replace them. Content about other countries and cities, with hotels, transportation, and itineraries, still lives in its own destination sections. That is where the suggestions at the end of each piece lead.

The section grows when the editorial team makes a new decision or refines an earlier one. We reread published pieces and check them against official sources, and after an edit we update the date of the check. If our position changes, we will say so in this section, openly and with the reasons explained. For now it stays the same. We do not publish guides to Russia, occupied Crimea, or Abkhazia, and we do not help plan trips there. If you are choosing a different destination, open the guide sections: you will find cities, accommodation, transportation, and practical details for getting ready.