Ukraine’s Parliament on June 18 approved President Petro Poroshenko’s request to sack Valentyn Nalyvaichenko as head of the Security Service of Ukraine, amid growing recriminations over who is to blame for the government’s faltering drive against crime and corruption. https://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/sbu-chief-fired-after-flap-with-poroshenko-391460.html
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Russia hawks on Capitol Hill love Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s point person for Ukraine. Many Europeans can’t stand her. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/18/the-undiplomatic-diplomat/
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Russia faces a series of challenges and should use its current period of economic crisis as an opportunity to make far-reaching reforms, Russia’s political and business leaders have told CNBC at a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
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Investment in Russia has slowed to a trickle, capital flight has risen and the economy has been sliding into recession since oil prices tumbled last year and the West imposed economic sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis.
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Ukraine’s biggest private creditors mounted a firm defence Wednesday of their refusal to accept a debt write-off that could keep the impoverished but strategic ex-Soviet nation from slipping into default.
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So when we hear threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will respond to the West’s improved NATO defenses on Russia’s border, our response is: Bring it on, peewee Stalin!
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Arming Ukraine would only fan the flames of tension between the West and Russia, leading the United States into a conflict it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, want.
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It is 25 years since this correspondent first set foot in Europe’s largest city. In those days, the air was thick with cheap gasoline, cars were all Zhigulis (Ladas) and ZiLs – or else dodgy, paperless German saloons driven by men with thick necks and leather jackets. A chic lunch was a kebab at the Baku restaurant on Gorky street; […]
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The end of the United States’ premier federal program for Russian studies saved taxpayers only $3.3 million—the cost of two Tomahawk cruise missiles or about half a day’s sea time for an aircraft carrier strike group. The development was part of a broader trend: the scaling back of a long-term national commitment to education and research focused on international affairs. […]
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Whenever the bombs fell, the men and women in the psychiatric ward would huddle in terror around fellow patient Valentina Izotova, a stout, maternal-looking woman, and she would read to them from her favorite book. They hardly understood a word, but her voice soothed them.
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Russian SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer in international waters in the Black Sea late in May, just days after the Royal Air Force scrambled to intercept nuclear-capable Bear bombers near British airspace. These dangerous Russian games of chicken are now regular occurrences and come hard upon a Russian threat in March to aim nuclear missiles at Danish warships […]
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Dealing with a bully that behaves worse when it senses a lack of resolve or a lack of respect is a delicate task.
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At this critical moment for the future of Ukrainian, European and U.S. interests in the region, the U.S.-Ukraine strategic partnership lacks both strategy and partnership.
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With the peace process stalled and violence escalating in Ukraine, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is defying President Obama and European allies by pressing the administration to provide weapons to the embattled nation http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/world/europe/defying-obama-many-in-congress-press-to-arm-ukraine.html
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At the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union began the largest experiment in industrialised housing in history. Owen Hatherley visits three of Moscow’s resulting mikrorayons, where the majority of Muscovites still live today
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The published forum program listed as attending Jim Rogers, chairman of the Miami financial company Beeland Interests; John Wories, president of Amsted Rail; and Jacob Frenkel, chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase International. David Bonderman, a founder of TPG capital, a private equity investor with shares in a grocery store chain here, also reportedly planned to attend. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/business/international/despite-tensions-us-company-officials-attend-russian-economic-forum.html?_r=0
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In Ukraine, lives continue to be lost, families are split, property is destroyed, the economy is decimated, ethnic divisions proliferate, and political unity remains non-existent. The human tragedy grows every day. The U.S., Europe, and Russia seem deadlocked, unable to understand the other’s point of view.
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Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk rejected criticisms from Russia on Wednesday that the embattled government in Kiev is failing to work toward reconciliation with separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk.
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Gazprom has no plans to continue using Ukraine as a transit country for gas exports after 2019, Deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev told journalists. “When the transit contract with Ukraine expires, there will be no prolongation, no conclusion of a new transit agreement under any circumstances. In light of the economic, commercial, technological, investment and political risks for gas transit, there […]
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Russian companies, spurred by healthy profits, have sharply raised sales of vital motor fuel to Ukraine this year, while at the same time also supplying the area of the country held by pro-Moscow separatists.
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Several times during the cold war, miscommunication almost led to nuclear conflict. Now, amid tensions over Ukraine, Russia and the West are showing a new failure to communicate.
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“Despite the technical improvements and selective increase in operational capability, the Russian military remains a shadow of its perceived capability.”
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The plan was to create a new type of city that answered the needs of Moscow’s creative middle classes. But did the exit of Sergei Kapkov, the culture minister who ushered in these changes, also signal the end of the city’s urban revival?
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Lviv has the ambience of Prague or Krakow, but without the prices or the crowds. Ukrainians can’t go to Crimea anymore, and visas are tough. But in Lviv, you can eat a good meal for a few euros, go to the opera or just sit in the parks and watch people for free. Click here for “Ukraine’s Most Hopeful […]
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… Petro Poroshenko put Crimea front and center at his third news conference as president today on June 5.
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President Poroshenko claimed today that Russian forces are set to invade Ukraine. But the spark that ignites new fighting may actually prove to be domestic.
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Ukraine will stick to the Minsk II peace agreement, even though Russia might launch a “full-scale” invasion in the eastern Donbas, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said during an address to Parliament on June 4 almost a year after he came to power. He was inaugurated on June
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Scott Blacklin has been held in Nizhny Novgorod since May 20, for alleged visa violation
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President Vladimir Putin is still likely to host the World Cup in 2018 despite an FBI investigation into Russia’s winning bid but his hopes of staging a tournament that impresses his critics are fading.
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Russia’s Gazprom plans to start building a pipeline to Turkey this month to get gas to Europe without going through Ukraine, company sources said, although it has no firm agreement with Ankara and faces opposition from the European Union.
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Tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine have blocked a deal in which Moscow was to buy the ships, leaving Paris trying to negotiate a face-saving compromise and work out CAwhat to do with two unwanted warships.
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Last week Mr. Putin added a new and especially cruel twist to his formula of deception by decreeing that the deaths or wounds of Russian soldiers in “special operations” can be classified as military secrets, even in peacetime. In the past, the list of state secrets applied only to personnel losses in wartime.
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In Ukraine’s west, long a bastion of pro-European sentiment, the war and economic crisis are shaking faith in the country’s leadership
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Fighting in eastern Ukraine has eased recently, but at least 6,417 people have died in the conflict and abuses that may amount to war crimes continue to be committed by both sides, the United Nations said Monday.
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Russia economy forecast to grow by 0.7pc next year, reversing negative growth forecast The World Bank is seeing some improvement in Russia’s battered economy, predicting it would shrink by 2.7pc this year and return to growth of 0.7pc in 2016.
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So much for February’s Ukraine cease-fire. Russian proxies on Saturday shelled Avdiyivka, a town in eastern Ukraine held by the Kiev government, killing a Ukrainian service member and a civilian in an attack that also shut down a coke-manufacturing plant. On Sunday pro-Kremlin forces fired on Ukrainian positions near the port of Mariupol, killing a Ukrainian soldier and wounding two.
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… You know, it’s now been 14 months since Russian aggression in Ukraine last spring. And it has literally transformed the landscape of European security. Everybody wants this conflict to end as soon as possible. The question is on whose terms and how will it end. Because it’s not a remote conflict between neighbors arguing over who gets what, what’s happening […]
» Read moreDynasty, which promotes scientific education, is funded almost entirely by Russian communications tycoon Dmitry Zimin. Because he’s using offshore accounts to do so, he’s run afoul of Kremlin bureaucrats. Critics say it’s time for a rethink.
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During those tense days in early March when Vladimir Putin disappeared from public view, the Russian president issued only one official statement: He instructed his prime minister to prepare a blueprint for a new federal agency that would work toward ‘consolidating the unity of the multiethnic nation of the Russian Federation.’The move passed relatively unnoticed, but it raises provocative questions. […]
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The armed forces of the self-proclaimed “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics” (“LNR” and “DNR”) have accumulated significant reserves of heavy weapons. According to deputy commander of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, Col. Valentyn Fedychev, as of 8 April 2015 Russia’s hybrid army in Donbas has 700 tanks, over 1 100 ACVs, 600 artillery systems, and 380 MRLS, as reported by news.liga.net
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Despite a small rebound in world oil prices, “Russia is not out of the woods yet because the sanctions are going to continue to have an impact,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former State Department official who served in Moscow and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/25/russia-recovery-talk-premature-as-sanctions-threat/
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“They’ve made the center look nicer than the outskirts, because only the rich come there. They don’t care about the outskirts where the poorer people live, some even still in bomb shelters,” a woman told the Kyiv Post.
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The war in Ukraine suggests a new era of competition between the West and Russia. It has (again) revealed both fundamental differences in how European security is understood, and increasing friction in values. Together, these problems suggest an emergent ‘clash of Europes’ that pits the West’s relatively liberal vision for the region against a more conservative ‘Russian Europe’
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Where Ukraine really needs U.S. help is in the area of domestic security. In other words, it needs to fight the kind of war Russia has started – especially now, since the hot conflict in its eastern part has become stationary and the war is entering a clandestine phase.
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Our comparative project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation examines post-Maidan attitudes in Ukraine, as well as in Crimea now annexed to Russia, and in the Russian-supported de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. In December 2014, we organized simultaneous public opinion surveys in these regions and surveyed …
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Construction of the almost 2,000km fence began following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2014
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Over a year after violent conflict began in East Ukraine, indications are emerging of its severe environmental impacts in the highly industrialised Donbas region, and the grave health risks to civilians that will endure long into the future. The area will need international assistance both to reduce the hazards, and to ‘green’ the region’s often polluting industries.
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