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Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 18 visited the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, triggering an angry rebuke from Kyiv, which accused him of disregarding international law by traveling to the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Moscow three years ago.

Putin's visit included a trip to a memorial complex honoring a coastal battery that defended Sevastopol during World War II, where he and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev placed flowers and met with members of the Night Wolves, a pro-Kremlin biker movement.

The trip is at least the ninth visit by Putin to Crimea since it was annexed by Russia in March 2014. Both the United States and the European Union have hit Moscow with several waves of sanctions over the land grab and Russia's backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry denounced Putin's visit in an August 18 statement, condemning it as a "gross violation of Ukraine's state sovereignty and territorial integrity."

The ministry added that it had delivered a note of protest to the Russian Foreign Ministry over what it called Moscow's "cynical and demonstrative disregard" for "generally accepted norms of international law."

In March 2014, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the Russian-orchestrated referendum on Crimea's secession from Ukraine was invalid and urging the international community "not to recognize any alteration of the status" of the peninsula.

The measure passed by a vote of 100-11 with 58 abstentions.

"Crimea and the city of Sevastopol are and will remain an integral part of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

The war between Russia-backed separatists and Kyiv's forces that followed the Crimea annexation has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014 and persisted despite a pact known as Minsk II, a February 2015 agreement on a cease-fire and steps to resolve the conflict.

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Putin Angers Ukraine With Visit To Russia-Annexed Crimea - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

While the intelligence community continues to look into Fancy Bear, the hacking group widely believed to have broken the Democratic National Committees cybersecurity last year, authorities are reportedly getting help from Ukraine. The New York Times reports that a hacker credited with developing one of the tools used during the DNC infiltration has been speaking with police (just writing malicious code is not criminal, so he hasnt been charged) and been made available to the FBI.

Profexer, as he is known online, created the P.A.S. web shell, though Serhiy Demediuk, head of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, told theTimesthat he told us he didnt create it to be used in the way it was. The software was freely available online.

Also newly reported in theTimesreport is that the FBI is in possession of evidence of a Russia-linked electoral hack that happened in Ukraine in 2014. Traces of the same code from that hack were found by researchers investigating the DNC.

Whats interesting is that the Ukrainian election cyberattack revealed damning connections between the Russian government. Heres how it played out:

Intriguingly, in the cyberattack during the Ukrainian election, what appears to have been a bungle by Channel 1, a Russian state television station, inadvertently implicated the government authorities in Moscow.

Hackers had loaded onto a Ukrainian election commission server a graphic mimicking the page for displaying results. This phony page showed a shocker of an outcome: an election win for a fiercely anti-Russian, ultraright candidate, Dmytro Yarosh. Mr. Yarosh in reality received less than 1 percent of the vote.

The false result would have played into a Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine today is ruled by hard-right, even fascist, figures.

The fake image was programmed to display when polls closed, at 8 p.m., but a Ukrainian cybersecurity company, InfoSafe, discovered it just minutes earlier and unplugged the server.

State television in Russia nevertheless reported that Mr. Yarosh had won and broadcast the fake graphic, citing the election commissions website, even though the image had never appeared there. The hacker had clearly provided Channel 1 with the same image in advance, but the reporters had failed to check that the hack actually worked.

The DNC hack shared code with the 2014 Ukrainian hack, in which circumstantial evidence points to Russia government collaboration. As has often been the case throughout this process, the evidence falls short of conclusive, though the similarities in tools and tactics during both hacks are tough to ignore.

Two years ago, Andrew Macias became a meme after a reporter asked if hed miss his mom while he was at school and he started to cry.

Breitbarts editor-in-chief tweeted just the word war, and the replies are exactly what youd expect.

Redditors, too.

The Grease classic reimagined for the resistance.

James Damore also claims his anti-diversity memo empowered women at Google.

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Cloudflare kicked the Daily Stormer offline in part because it could.

Facebook Anon was taken offline following the 2016 election.

Google, GoDaddy, Twitter, Facebook, and Cloudflare have all cut ties with the site.

One hacker whose code was used is speaking with authorities.

Michael Cohen tweeted he has no tolerance for racism and included a half-dozen pictures of himself with black people for dramatic effect.

Its playing catch-up with Netflix.

Its no longer about equal access to an open dialogue.

Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the Confederate, briefly had some company on Wikipedia today.

Think of the statues, please.

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Ukraine Is Proving Key to the DNC Hack Investigation - New York Magazine

KIEV (Reuters) - The Ukrainian central bank said on Friday it had warned state-owned and private lenders of the appearance of new malware as security services said Ukraine faced cyber attacks like those that knocked out global systems in June.

The June 27 attack, dubbed NotPetya, took down many Ukrainian government agencies and businesses, before spreading rapidly through corporate networks of multinationals with operations or suppliers in eastern Europe.

Kiev's central bank has since been working with the government-backed Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and police to boost the defenses of the Ukrainian banking sector by quickly sharing information.

"Therefore on Aug. 11..., the central bank promptly informed banks about the appearance of new malicious code, its features, compromise indicators and the need to implement precautionary measures to prevent infection," the central bank told Reuters in emailed comments.

According to its letter to banks, seen by Reuters, the new malware is spread by opening email attachments of word documents.

"The nature of this malicious code, its mass distribution, and the fact that at the time of its distribution it was not detected by any anti-virus software, suggest that this attack is preparation for a mass cyber-attack on the corporate networks of Ukrainian businesses," the letter said.

Ukraine - regarded by some, despite Kremlin denials, as a guinea pig for Russian state-sponsored hacks - is fighting an uphill battle in turning pockets of protection into a national strategy to keep state institutions and systemic companies safe.

The state cyber police and Security and Defence Council have said Ukraine could be targeted on Aug. 24 with a NotPetya-style attack aimed at destabilizing the country as it celebrates its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union.

Writing by Alessandra Prentice; editing by Mark Heinrich

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Ukraine central bank warns of new cyber-attack risk - Reuters

Statues and busts of Vladimir Lenin, once ubiquitous in Ukraine, have been torn down in every city across the country as part of a decommunisation drive.

Volodymyr Vyatrovych, head of Ukraine's institute of national memory, said in aninterviewwith local publication Liga.net that 2,389 monuments, including 1,320 monuments to Mr Lenin, have been razed across Ukraine.

Lenin is no more in cities in Ukrainian-controlled territory, Mr Vyatrovych said.

However, some Lenins likely remain in villages or on factory grounds and can be dismantled only when found, since such statues were never registered with the government, he said. The communist leader also lives on in the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists prize the Soviet past and decry the pro-Western Kiev government as a fascist regime.

Most of the Lenin statues were gypsum figures with no historical value, Mr Vyatrovych claimed, and were simply destroyed. Those made of valuable metals were melted down, while a few dozen large monuments were saved for a museum of Soviet propaganda to be established in Kiev.

The latest toppling of Lenin statues, known colloquially as the Leninfall,began when protestors pulled down a Lenin in Kiev during the Euromaidan demonstrations that eventually toppled president Viktor Yanukovych.

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Lenin becomes Lennon: As US struggles with Confederate legacy Ukraine announces end to communist monuments - Telegraph.co.uk

The decision whether or not to provide Ukraine with weapons has now reached the White House. Both the State Department and Pentagon approved this policy and Kurt Volker, President Trumps special envoy for Ukraine, has also done so.

Nevertheless, opponents of this policy have again flooded the media arguing against giving Ukraine these weapons. Their arguments boil down into three categories: Russia allegedly retains escalation dominance and will be provoked if we do so, our allies oppose this move and in any event Ukraine does not merit these weapons due to its democratic or other capability deficits. Unfortunately, all three arguments are unfounded.

Russia commits daily major violations of the Minsk accords x and its forces have killed about 10,000 Ukrainians, devastated eastern and southern Ukraine, imposed ethnic purges if not ethnic cleansing on Crimea and shot down unarmed civilian airliners. Beyond this it has sponsored terrorism in Ukraine and wages an unrelenting information and economic warfare against Ukraine. Finally, it has launched information warfare and constant threats against all of Europe and the U.S.

Yet Russia cannot and dare not launch an all out war against Ukraine because of the limits to its own military capability which amounts to about 100,000 men capable of being operationally deployed against a resolute and steadily improving Ukrainian army. Indeed, these opponents of helping Ukraine refuse to acknowledge the progress made by this army or the resolute fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people lest that detract from their narrative of a Russia unlimited by its own economic weakness and military capabilities. Actually Putin himself had to announce defense cutbacks on August 14.

Russia cannot and dare not sustain a protracted war that would lead to many fatalities and is the inevitable cost of further escalation even though it can always make life miserable for Ukraine.

By giving Ukraine weapons we raise the cost to Russia when it can least afford it and adopt Moscows long-standing tactic by helping Ukraine fight and talk simultaneously. We thus replicate the way we helped drive Soviet forces from Afghanistan and fully accords with our policy since 1947 of helping people who wish to be free defend themselves against naked aggression.

Second, although our allies have decided not to offer weapons, they have stated that they would accept it if we decided to do so. Clearly this is an amber flashing light, not a stop sign. Neither will they pressure Ukraine to accept the Minsk accords when Russia violated them before the ink was dry and still does so. Therefore alleged allied opposition is not only no argument, it is utterly unfounded.

If anything, helping Ukraine defend itself and fulfilling our own prior assurances of its sovereignty and integrity in the 1994 Budapest document would strengthen allied confidence unlike the craven past policy of abandoning our commitments once Russia invaded Ukraine.

Third, admittedly Ukraine suffers from many well known and extensively reported democratic and other defects so do w , as recent events clearly show. Thus Ukraine is hardly unique. And in any case the quality of its governance and democratic credentials is ultimately irrelevant to the issue of a country struggling to build democracy that must fight for its life, freedom, territorial integrity and sovereignty against naked aggression.

It is clearly in our interest as the guarantor of European and Ukrainian security as well as as the upholder of a liberal world order that aggression not be rewarded. Therefore failure to act not only rewards Russian aggression it actually increases the chances of U.S. troops fighting in Europe.

Ukraine may not be perfect. But it will defend its freedom and only wants us to give it the tools to finish the job as we assured Ukraine we would. Moreover, the longer this war drags on the less likely it is that Ukraine will become more democratic or that it will be able to reform its economy by itself. That would be impossible in wartime. Neither does giving Ukraine the means of self-defense prevent us and our allies from leaning on Kyiv to continue reforms. If anything, doing so gives us more leverage for Ukraine will not long heed people whom it feels abandoned it during its crisis. Thus the arguments for opposition lack a basis in reality and should be dismissed.

President Trump should authorize the provision of these weapons for Ukraine today, just like Polish members of Solidarity in the 1980s are not only fighting for their freedom, they are fighting for ours.

Stephen Blank is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is the author of numerous foreign policy-related articles, white papers and monographs, specifically focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia. He is a former MacArthur Fellow at the U.S. Army War College.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Why we should help Ukraine defend itself - The Hill (blog)