Russian aggression against Ukraine: plenary debate and resolution on Tuesday

This article is brought to you in association with the European Parliament. MEPs will debate with Presidents Michel and von der Leyen and EU Foreign Policy chief Borrell Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and vote a related resolution. The debate will take place from 12.30 to 14.30, and the announcement of the final vote on the draft […]

IMF’s Lagarde: Ukraine must fight corruption

This story is brought to you in association with the International Monetary Fund Statement by the IMF Managing Director on Ukraine, June 19, 2018 Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine, spoke yesterday about recent events. Following the call, Ms. Lagarde issued the following statement: “I […]

Trump stumbles badly on his Russian openings; Europeans wary of Putin

In the fourth week of the Trump Presidency things have become more hectic. Those around the boss are now people of authority, and their actions directly affect America and the world. It’s not only that the chief himself changes his mind from one day to the next about crucial global issues, like the ‘one China’ […]

A shortened EU Summit admits failures, makes risky promises

Last Thursday, 15 December, the cut down to one day European Summit, confirmed that Europe continues on the wrong path. The 27 + 1 leaders acknowledged the complete failure of key policies regarding Syria and Turkey and kept making promises to Ukraine and Georgia they cannot honor. Unfortunately, Brussels refuses to learn the lessons still […]

The G7 adopted dangerous views about Ukraine and Greece

Last weekend the leaders of the G7 countries in reality acknowledged their impotency or probably unwillingness to effectively confront the expansion of the destructive and unlawful activities of the “too big to fail” banks and the shadow banking sector. After that, they decided that Ukraine and Greece have to go on bleeding in order not […]

Have Europe’s Ukrainian wounds begun to heal?

The wounds the Ukrainian civil war has inflicted on Europe have now stopped bleeding and if not begun healing at least they claim no more fatalities. The Minsk II agreement is holding well and the Europeans, most of them, have made clear to the Americans that there is no chance of starting a new war […]

Only the Americans are unhappy with the ceasefire agreement in eastern Ukraine

Despite the fact that the Minsk ceasefire agreement is holding more or less well and the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine has stopped, the Americans seem quite unhappy. They insist on the need to supply the Ukrainians with heavy armaments to continue the war, this time clearly against Putin’s Russia. Let’s follow the facts. On 25 […]

The West and Russia accomplished the dismembering and the economic destruction of Ukraine

With the Minsk Agreement the West and Russia finally got what they wanted or close to that from Ukraine, not minding much about leaving the miserable country in ruins, its map ruthlessly chopped and the economy in a perfect chaos. On the one side the EU or rather Berlin and Paris plus Washington and on […]

Greece and Ukraine main items on EU28 menu; the course is set

The world community will be watching very closely today’s gathering of the 28 leaders of the European Union in Brussels. The reason is that its agenda includes two crucial issues; the economic fate of Greece and a discussion on the outcome of a conference in Minsk, Belarus for the future of Ukraine. Yesterday afternoon both […]

Europe, US and Russia haggle over Ukraine’s convulsing body; Russians and Americans press on for an all out civil war

Germany and France are alarmed at the prospect that the Americans could turn Ukraine into an unbelievable inferno, by overtly delivering heavy armaments to Kiev. In such an event implications on Europe’s security will be vast. The French President François Hollande and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel rushed to Moscow last Friday and met the […]

Can Kiev make face to mounting economic problems and social unrest?

The time of truth for the European Union’s strategy on the Ukrainian question finally came. Brussels is about to let the poor country not only be dismembered, but what will be left of it will be pushed into an economic and political inferno. As it happens, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker essentially ‘ordered’ Kiev to “bring […]

Brussels wins game and match in Ukraine no matter the electoral results

Yesterday’s election in Ukraine, even if after countless countings over the next days it gives President Petro Poroshenko’s Block a clear victory, is not expected to change anything to the better for the war-torn country. Kiev held this election in the loyal regions and the pro-Russian rebels in Luhansk and Donetsk are to hold theirs […]

Russia accepts what the EU has to offer and settles to negotiate with Ukraine

This time the Europeans did it without the Americans in Ukraine. They managed to convince Russia to guarantee unobstructed natural gas supplies for the war-torn country and the EU for ‘at least’ during this winter. They did it last Friday in Milan, northern Italy, during the EU-Asia leaders meeting. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel took […]

The West and Russia impose a new order on the world

The US led confrontation of the West with Russia has just generated the first tangible and sizeable losses for Europe. German equity values and EU agricultural exports to Russia registered heavy costs last week, while the New York Stock Exchange recorded only minor harms. Those developments came after the EU activated its last package of […]

The MH17 tragedy to put a tombstone on Ukrainian civil war

The anthropoid beast that pressed the button to release the missile which brought down the MH17 Malaysian Airlines flight, killing all the 298 people aboard must be held responsible before humanity. Probably though, it will never be clarified for sure who was behind this hideous crime. The search for the culpable party may start from […]

The Ukrainian crisis to destabilize Europe and the world for a long time

The Kiev government and the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko may be celebrating their military victory in ‘recapturing’ the rebel town of Sloviansk, but they don’t seem to mind much about the future. For one thing the pro-Russian rebels have not been defeated, at least not yet; they withdrew from the northern parts of the Donetsk […]

Europe might not avoid new partitioning on Ukrainian crisis

It seems that a confrontational paranoia is engulfing our world. The British Prime minister is waging an aggressive campaign (which may end up being self-destructive) against the candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker for the Presidency of the Commission. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel is encountering this British challenge with an all-out offensive having organized a continental […]

What options the new President of Ukraine has?

Petro Poroshenko, the new Ukrainian President elect, is one of the wealthiest men of his country, but he is not an oligarch in the sense that he hasn’t made his fortune by getting government contracts and concessions. He actually is the only exception to the rule, that all business tycoons of this badly governed state, […]

Germany and OSCE support an east-west dialogue in Ukraine without exclusions

The West has lost the ball in Ukraine, while the Kremlin ruler tries to make the most out of it. What happened in Mariupol and Sloviansk cannot be justified. West’s allies in the country, that is the extreme right-wing groups and the mercenaries also working for the local oligarchs, proved uncontrollable and untrustworthy. At the […]

Who threatens the lives and livelihoods of Ukrainians?

People who fail to recognize that the stalemate in Ukraine cannot be resolved unilaterally by military force are not only very dangerous but are political, if not common law, crooks. For example, the appointed by the Maidan ‘regiments’, Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a lieutenant of the corrupt ex-Prime Minister Jylia Tymoshenko, while in Odessa […]

What the G7 wants to do in eastern Ukraine

  It took only hours for the West and Russia to discover, after their 17 April Geneva agreement, that the situation in Ukraine is much more complicated than they wanted to make the rest of the world and the public opinion in their home countries believe. The belief that a few men, representing the Organisation […]

The West and Russia took what they wanted from Ukraine

Yesterday, in Geneva the representatives of the EU, the US and Russia did on Ukraine what the European Sting said they were about to do; partition the poor country. By the way, the Ukrainian ‘Foreign Minister’ Andriy Deshchytsia was around, while the three were negotiating about the future and the actual existence of his country, […]

Russia and the West use the same tactics to dismember Ukraine

It’s amazing how much distanced from reality the EU’s foreign policy must be, under the permanent Council Presidency of Lady Catherine Ashton. There is no other explanation than this, if one takes seriously the agenda of yesterday’s EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, under the chair of the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs […]

The EU invites the US and Russia to partition Ukraine

With an announcement of a few words, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton announced yesterday that Ukraine accepted to participate in a meeting planned to take place in Geneva together with representatives of Russia, the EU and the US. The international relations tradition and practice has it, that whenever a weak country, tormented by existential internal […]

Ukraine: Is there a political force able to undo the division?

Last Monday, the EU Foreign Affairs Council condemned the illegal referendum in Crimea and took restrictive measures against 21 Russian and Crimean politicians and military officers. Also on Monday, probably without understanding what they were doing, the 28 European Foreign Ministers had the unfortunate idea to discuss during the same meeting the present state of […]

Ukraine: The West and Russia negotiate shares of influence

The seriousness of approach, the magnitude of the interest and the pertinence of the proposal the European Union adopted yesterday to end the stalemate in Ukraine can be seen in the kind of money the EU sets aside for this country. José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission stated yesterday that the Union can […]

Europe enters uncharted waters with Kiev-Moscow standoff

With a brief announcement of the G7, the West is practically recognising the occupation of Crimea by the Russian armed forces as a ‘fait accompli’ and by the same token the dismembering of Ukraine. The announcement signed yesterday by the G7 heads of states or governments, even accepts that Russia has “security or human rights […]

Ukraine’s new political order not accepted in Crimea

With the blessed by the West Julia Tymoshenko’s men in control of Kiev’s political scenery, and Russian army units or paramilitary units of Crimean Russians in control of the Black Sea southern peninsula, the Ukrainian division seems to consolidate. The EU and the US have practically recognized the new political order which is now established […]

The new Kiev rulers ask $35 billion from the West

The new rulers of Kiev now demand from the West 35 billion in an aid package, without making it clear if this is in dollars or euros. As they say ‘after the meal comes the bill’ and the West has to come up with a convincing support scheme, because Ukraine can turn around and change […]

Can the US deal a blow to EU and Russia together over Ukraine?

Within 24 hours the agreement that the European Union brokered in Ukraine was turned into a worthless paper by around 200 MPs and some hundreds of heavily armed ‘protestors’ in Kiev. Given that the power behind this radical change in the Parliament couldn’t be Russia or the EU it has to be Ukraine’s proper oligarchs, […]

Russia won’t let Ukraine drift westwards in one piece

Somebody must stop this person heading Europe’s diplomacy in the External Action service. Yesterday Catherine Ashton broke all limits in two successive statements, one for Libya and another for Ukraine. Even if she doesn’t mind her own credibility and political correctness, her bosses in, London, Berlin and Paris have to think again if she adds […]

Russia and the West to partition Ukraine?

As if history wanted to remind everybody what will be the outcome of direct foreign intervention in a region or country divided by internal differences, the Bosnians took it to the street to end a fallacy of governance at a time when Ukraine is about to follow suit in this direction. Kiev’s political elite, the […]

EU-Russia summit in the shadows of Kiev’s fumes

In the shadows of fume of the protest fires in Kiev’s Independence Square, the 32nd EU-Russia summit is expected to take place in Brussels this Tuesday. It will end with a working lunch, without an official dinner being held. The EU side dropped it as an indication of deep concern about Moscow’s role in Ukraine. […]