Archives: January 2017

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said he saw no linkage in president-elect Donald Trump’s offer to remove sanctions if Russia reduced its nuclear weapons.

US President Barack Obama extends sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin deferred a response to president-elect Donald Trump’s offer to trade an end to sanctions for Russia’s nuclear cuts.

The US Vice President said that Ukraine must work to defeat the “cancer of corruption.”

Elevated levels of fighting persist throughout eastern Ukraine, sparking fears of more Russian aggression

Russia-backed fighters shelled Ukrainian positions 34 times all along the front line, with one Ukrainian soldier killed and two wounded.

Fighting intensified near Lugansk. 78 ceasefire violations were reported nationwide, though fewer in the Mariupol sector than yesterday

Ukrainians and their friends and supporters have been so worried that any grand bargain between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will be a new “Munich” in which Ukraine will be handed over in whole or in part to the Kremlin that they have not considered fully just what any “deal” might look like.

While the attention of Russians and others around the world have been diverted – and one should ask be asking what they have been diverted from and why – ten pieces of bad even disastrous economic news have come out from or about Russia in the last 24 hours alone.

Three Ukrainian soldiers were wounded today on the front line in 38 attacks, the ATO reported. One civilian woman was also injured in shelling by Russia-backed forces in Maryinka.

A number of stories in Chechnya this week indicate that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is bringing further control over the Islamist insurgency remaining in the republic and cracking down on the independent press to prevent public criticism of his harsh methods.