Ukraine crisis. News in brief. Thursday 21 January [Ukrainian sources]

THURSDAY

Please scroll down to view news items added during the day

News -
Putin fired 29 times yesterday at the Ukrainian people.
Update - six soldiers injured yesterday.

Weather -
Still cool. -12 in Kiev overnight. High maybe of -6. But warmer than the forecast.
Next week's weather looking warmer - nearer zero.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2016/01/21/7096116/
The second reading of constitutional changes can only occur against the backdrop of progress in the security and humanitarian points of the Minsk agreements.
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Deputy of Poro block on Facebook.
Agree totally.

7:03
http://24tv.ua/kreml_shukaye_sposib_viyti_z_viyni_na_donbasi_zberigshi_oblichchya__rferl_n650329
The Kremlin is trying to find a way to end the war in the Donbass, which would allow her to save face before their own voters and the world.
This is a podcast Daily Vertical said political commentator Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Brian Whitmore....
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I post this, not for the news - the podcast was posted on yesterday's News in brief - but for the fact that the Ukrainian press is now quoting Whitmore.
Why oh why can't the BBC or the Guardian, or the Telegraph get a journalist like Whitmore to report from Ukraine?
Really funny seeing Whitmore's name in Ukrainian!
Про це в подкасті Daily Vertical заявив політичний оглядач Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Брайан Вітмор.

http://espreso.tv/news/2016/01/21/poroshenko_i_bayden_uzgodyly_diyi_dlya_povnogo_vykonannya_minskykh_ugod
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko met in Davos with Vice President Joseph Biden
Reported Espreso.TV with reference to the press service of the President.
Poroshenko said after the meeting that lasted over four hours, that primarily discussed security issues....



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Over 4 hours!! Wow... Remember that Poroshenko can speak English. So that is a long long meeting.
Hopefully they have sorted out a list of things that need to be done, and their order. What to agree to with Putin, and what not to agree to.
I notice that Kerry is also in the photo. Was this taken before, or after Kerry's meeting with Lavrov?



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See also, in English, from the President's website -
President of Ukraine and U.S. Vice President agreed to coordinate actions for the full implementation of the Minsk agreements
http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/prezident-ukrayini-ta-vice-prezident-ssha-domovilis-pro-skoo-36637
Photos from this link.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-ukraine-crimea-idUSKCN0UY2HG
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Not a chance while Putin is in power. More chance of Russia itself breaking apart.

http://en.censor.net.ua/news/370200/kyiv_and_washington_united_in_nord_stream_ii_criticism_poroshenko
..."We have clearly stressed on Nord Stream II ...[that it is] purely [a] political project, aimed both against Ukraine and a significant number of EU countries, ..
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Note also - former German Chancellor Schroeder, close buddy of Putin the dictator, has big big money invested in Gasprom. He will try and influence things in favor of $$$$ in his own pocket.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35370819
The murder of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in the UK was "probably" approved by President Vladimir Putin, an inquiry has found.
Mr Putin is likely to have signed off the poisoning of Mr Litvinenko with polonium-210 in part due to personal "antagonism" between the pair, it said....
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You don't get polonium from the local Boots - drugstore. Same with tanks in Donbass. All evil comes from Putin.

The future of FSU is being shaped in Kyiv – if Ukraine is changed, Russia will be affected by this change. This is what Vladimir putin is scared by, a Russian businessman and economist Yevgeni Chichvarkin said, addressing a recent anti-corruption forum in Kharkiv, Mij Kharkiv reported Jan. 20.

“Georgia was the first chilling message to Putin, and its then president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was Putin’s enemy No. 1. because he defeated corruption in Georgia. If the same happens in Ukraine, the Russians, on entering Ukraine, will see an optimistically-minded society where cops take no bribes, schools and hospitals work effectively. The new Ukraine will become Putin’s worst nightmare,” Chichvarkin said.

“The Russians are still brainwashed by Putin’s ‘victories’. However, Putin’s popularity is on the wane,” the Russian said.

zik.ua

http://www.unian.info/economics/1243139-european-parliament-calls-eu-states-to-avoid-building-new-gas-pipeline-from-russia.html
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A proposal passed today.

http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/economic/319146.html
The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, has expressed a favorable view about the prospect of giving Ukraine yet another IMF tranche.
Lagarde told reporters on Thursday after talks with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko in Davos that in her view it was a very positive discussion....
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Admin just sent me out in the snow to chat with some people in a cafe.
I talked politics with some young students. One lad said - there is no alternative now. People have to stick behind Poroshenko. Everybody else he dismissed out of hand.
The snow is falling again this evening. Pretty outside, but very slippy also. Snow on top of ice!

http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/319194.html
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No more info.

http://en.censor.net.ua/news/370357/russia_blocks_osce_access_to_ukrainianrussian_border_in_occupied_donbas
The Russian Federation has once again blocked the extension of the mandate of the OSCE monitoring mission at all border crossing points of the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Donbas.....
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Putin wants the war to continue. That much is clear. Idiot, like Hitler.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/21/l-todd-wood-ukraine-pushes-against-fiscally-weak-r/
The sanctions are the key issue. Russia could have most likely withstood the economic pressure put in place by the West, due to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, with the price of crude oil at $100. However, with the price of a barrel of oil headed to $20, there is no way the Russian economy can survive as its currently structure long-term in this environment.
In light of all of these geopolitical developments, Ukraine has decided to go on the offensive. In short, Ukraine wants its original country back....
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N.B. Washington Times, not Post!

www.xe.com
Rubles for one dollar / one euro / one pound
Inverse: 83.1729 90.5661 118.195

21:07
http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/news/27502124.html
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You can guarantee that Russia will simply not recognise any tribunal - unless Putin is the sole judge in the case.

“Russia is preparing bloody terrorist acts to accuse Crimean Tatars leaders and start offensive in Ukraine,” commander of the international battalion Adam Osmajev told journalists Jan. 21, UNIAN reports.

“From reliable sources we know that, between Jan. 4 and 9, four groups of 5-7 servicemen belonging to Chechen Terek battalion came to Crimea,” Osmajev said.

The terrorist acts [by Chechen servicemen who look like Crimean Tatars – Ed.] will be used by Russia to accuse Ukraine of disrupting the Minsk agreements and attacking Ukraine from the peninsula and Donbas, Osmajev said.

The terrorist acts will be staged at Symferopol’s markets, at Orthodox churches in Symferopol or at a naval vessel in Sevastopol.

Speaking to journalists, the battalion’s press officer, Amina Akujeva, stressed the Russian special services are doing everything to discredit Crimea Tatars leaders describing them as ISIS allies.

zik.ua

When Russian psychologist Pyotr Lyubchenkov started receiving telephone threats and was detained by the police for 10 days after posting several online comments denouncing Moscow's support of separatists in eastern Ukraine, he knew it was time to leave.

In June 2014, he fled Russia for what he thought would be a better, safer life in Ukraine.

But a year and a half later, his successive applications for political asylum have all been rejected and the Ukrainian authorities are now seeking to extradite him to Russia.

Lyubchenkov, who faces prison on extremism charges in his home country, has a word of warning for other embattled Russian opposition activists. "I strongly advise them against traveling to Ukraine and asking for political asylum," he said in a telephone interview from Odesa. "If you are in danger, you had better ask another country. Ukraine is not a safe place for refugees from Russia.

Amid a deepening Kremlin crackdown on dissent, more than 200 Russians who have fallen afoul of the authorities in their country have fled to Ukraine since the beginning of 2014, according to the Ukrainian State Migration Service.

Only a handful have been granted political asylum or other forms of protection by Ukrainian authorities.

For the rest, the apparent freedoms gained since the pro-democracy Maidan protests in Kyiv toppled Ukraine's Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 remain elusive.

Ukraine's migration service insists that its screening procedure for asylum applications is fair and impartial. "We are open," spokesman Serhiy Hunko told RFE/RL. "If it is the applicant’s wish, we are ready to consider each case together with the United Nations' refugee agency and human rights organizations, and to listen to the opinion of independent experts."

Some local rights groups are nonetheless alarmed by the massive legal hurdles facing Russian political emigres in Ukraine. "It is unacceptable to not provide asylum for people facing persecution for peaceful opposition activities in their own country," the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group said last week on its website.

"Incredibly, given the ongoing imprisonment of [Nadia] Savchenko, [Oleh] Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko, and other Ukrainians, as well as long sentences passed on Russians for peaceful protest, the Migration Service is still claiming that Russia is a democratic country to which activists can be returned," it added.

Prisoner Of Conscience................

To read further go to this link:   rferl.org

While observers around the world were sharing Marina Litvinenko’s relief that the likely role of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role in her husband’s murder had finally been clearly stated, pro-Kremlin media were in overdrive trying to undermine the report. Plausibility was difficult, but clearly seen as expendable given a sufficient number of ‘experts’ and outrageous lies. It had been tried before after the downing by a Russian-made Buk Missile of the MH17 passenger plane, so this one, about a person few know about and some obscure poison was easy.

NTV, for example, interviews Sergei Sokolov, described as the former head of Boris Berezovsky’s security guards. He claims that Alexander Litvinenko poisoned himself through careless treatment of radioactive polonium that Litvinenko himself stole from a base in Kazakhstan.

This story appears to have first been plugged by Edward Jay Epstein back in 2008. This was reported at the time by Mary Dejevsky, a British journalist who very often takes a line many of us would view as sympathetic to the current regime in Russia. In this case, both suggest ‘illicit nuclear trading’, with Berezovsky.

The version does not explain why the polonium trail was left by Andrei Lugovoi and Alexei Kovtun, not by Litvinenko, nor a huge amount of other evidence available to Scotland Yard from the beginning.

Both NTV and Life News have come up with ‘experts’ stating that polonium didn’t make sense.

Igor Korotchenko, Chief Editor of the journal National Defence tells NTV viewers that modern security services don’t use such methods as polonium because they can’t be hidden, and they cause a huge international scandal. ‘Therefore’ it was obviously done to both remove Litvinenko and to try to point the finger at Russia.

Life News found an ‘expert’ to confirm that polonium was too expensive to be used as a murder weapon. Boris Myasoyedov, identified as a member of the Russian Academy of Science, explained that using polonium would be economically inexpedient since there are numerous compounds which are more effective and difficult to discover. He asserts that for the first 138 days the poison is very easy to discover, unlike a huge number of other substances. “Polonium is simply last century”, he says.

Assiduous attempts to prove that polonium cannot be concealed ignore the fact that those who ordered the killing doubtless wanted Litvinenko himself and others to know that he had been poisoned. Those who chose to kill Boris Nemtsov so close to the Kremlin also had their reasons.

Certainly in the case of Litvinenko, they would not have wanted the culprits to have been so easily identified, but that, according to one of the experts who testified at the inquiry, was a fatal mistake that the perpetrators could probably not have foreseen. Norman Dombey, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, told the inquiry that the poison might not have been identified had they not carried out the murder in London where there happened to be the doctors and medical infrastructure to know who to turn to. Samples were sent to the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment, where experts recognized the signs that polonium 210 had been used.

“Virtually all the world’s supply of that particular isotope is made at the nuclear weapons assembly plant at Avangard in Russia, ” added Dombey. “That points a finger directly at Russia. However, had it not been for the experts on hand in London, that link would never had been made.”

The media viewed avoided mention of the allegations against Putin and the FSB. Life News, for example, mentions only the long-known accusations against Lugovoi and Kovtun. It ends that short report by asserting that “the British court was unable to prove Russia’s interest in Litvinenko’s death”. While Russian officials dismissed the report as of no interest, Moscow is reported to have signed a contract with the UK law firm Harbottle & Lewis for £2 million. The money – from the rapidly dwindling state coffers – is in fees for legal consultation provided to Russia’s Investigative Committee regarding the UK Crown Coroner’s Inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder in 2006. The payments agreed are from 2013 through 2016, with over half (£1, 171 million) due in 2016. There is no information as to what the fees are for....................

To read further go to this link: khpg.org 

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