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Separatists in eastern Ukraine claimed Tuesday to have founded a new country Malorossiya, which means Little Russia in English that they hope will eventually overtake Ukraine.

We offer Ukrainian citizens a peaceful way out of the difficult situation, without the war, Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, told reporters during a surprise announcement. This is our last offer not only to the Ukrainians, but also to all countries that supported the civil war in Donbass.

The move seems to undermine the falteringMinsk peace agreement, a 2015 deal reached between Russian-backed rebels and the government in Kiev that sought to end the violence in Ukraine's industrial east. News of the Malorossiya proposal quickly drew condemnation from the international community, with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko calling theDonetsk People's Republic apuppet show that broadcasts messages from Russia.

Notably, both Russia and other separatist movements in eastern Ukraine also distanced themselves from the move, with the self-proclaimedLuhansk People's Republic saying it wasnot notified ahead of time about the announcement and that discussions about the project were untimely.

Despite this, the proclamation of Malorossiya was dubbed a historic event by the Donetsk People's Republic. In a map released by the separatists, all of Ukraine was portrayed as part ofMalorossiya with the sole exception of Crimea, thepeninsula annexed by Russia in March 2014. Kiev would remain a historical and cultural center without the capital city status in the new state, according to the separatists' statement Tuesday, but Donetsk would be the new political center of Malorossiya.

TheDonetsk People's Republic also released a flag, which it said was based on that of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, a 17th-century Ukrainian Cossack leader who organized a rebellion against Polish rule and transferred Ukrainian lands to Russian control.

The rhetoric behind Malorossiyadraws on the complicated history of Ukraine. Much of what now makes up the country was once part of the Russian Empire and later theUkrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a part of the Moscow-dominated Soviet Union, until it gainedindependence in 1991.

Many people in eastern Ukraine are ethnically Russian and speak the Russian language. Many Russians also hail their own historical links to Ukrainian land and the Kievan Rus, an East Slavic state that peaked in the 11th century and was centered uponwhat is now the Ukrainian capital.

As tensions flared between Kiev and Russian-backed rebels in 2014, separatists beganto talk about the concept of Novorossiya a concept that means new Russia in English. The name referred to what is now the east of Ukraine lands that were taken from the Ottoman Empire by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century. RussianPresident Vladimir Putin referredto the historical concept during a December 2014 question-and-answer session.

However, Malorossiya is different fromNovorossiya. The word is thoughtto date back as far as the medieval era, but came intowidespread use under the Russian Empire in the 19th century when it was used to describe the land that now makes up Ukraine. The term has long been considered archaic in Ukraine itself; some nationalists use it disparagingly, and it issometimes used as an insult to describe Russified Ukrainians in the country's east.

Importantly, the word is usedto refer to almost of all of Ukraine rather than the eastern provinces that made upNovorossiya implying increased ambitions for theDonetsk People's Republic.Zakhar Prilepin, a Russian writer who formed a volunteer battalion for theDonetsk People's Republic, told the Komsomolskaya Pravdanewspaper that the ultimate aim ofMalorossiya was to merge with both Russia and Belarus.

Despite these lofty ideals, there were signs that the announcement of Malorossiya was rushed. The statement announcing the proposed country referred to "19 regions of the former Ukraine an apparent error as Ukraine has 24 administrative regions and the Malorossiya map showed all these regionsaccurately. Documents claiming to mark the official establishment of the country were riddled with red squiggly lines, suggesting that they were images taken hastily from word-processing software.

More strikingly, although the news was covered exhaustively by Russian state media Tuesday, Moscow said it did not support Zakharchenko's calls for Malorossiya, and there was little sign of backing from other separatists.

Kremlinpress secretary Dmitry Peskov distanced Russia from Malorossiya, telling reporters that the proposed country was a personal initiative ofZakharchenko. Moscow learned about it from the press, Peskov said. Boris Gryzlov, Russia's envoy for the Minsk talks, also Russian told journalists that the proposal was likely related to informational warfare and is not a subject of real politics.

Althoughthere seems little prospect ofMalorossiya becoming a recognized country anytime soon, Tuesday's announcement highlights that little progress has been made in finding a solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine since the Minsk agreement came into force in 2015.AndZakharchenko seemed undeterred by the low feasibility ofhis plan.

I am convinced that we will do everything possible and impossible, Zakharchenko told reporters Tuesday.

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Ukrainian separatists claim to have created a new country: Malorossiya, or 'Little Russia' - Washington Post

By Raphael Satter, Svetlana Kozlenko And Dmytro Vlasov The Associated Press

In this photo taken Wednesday, July 5, 2017, patients stand at the reception in a private clinic in Kiev, Ukraine. The clinic was one of many institutions disrupted by June 27 cyberattack which paralysed computers in Ukraine and across the globe. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

KIEV, Ukraine Dr. Lidiia Podkopaieva was about to click send on an order of new surgical instruments when her computer monitor suddenly went dark.

She speed-dialed the clinics technician but didnt even have time to tell him what was wrong.

Were under cyberattack, he told her. Switch off the computer immediately.

The call would kick off a crazy week as Podkopaieva and her staff struggled with the sudden loss of half the computers at the Left Bank Pediatric Clinic in Kyiv, where she serves as medical director. The central phone system collapsed, digital appointments vanished and diagnostic machines dropped offline, interrupting at least one patients exam. Podkopaieva said no one suffered in the attack, but academics argue that even glancing blows to medical facilities like this one represent a damaging break with international norms.

You cannot attack hospitals, said Duncan Hollis, a Temple University professor and a former treaty lawyer for the U.S. State Department. Although what happened at Podkopaievas clinic fell short of the death and destruction that would constitute an unambiguous attack, Hollis said the disruption was still a step in a dangerous direction.

READ MORE:Global cyberattack: where did it come from and is it under control?

Its getting close to, if not across the line of, actual harm that international law might be prohibiting, he said.

Podkopaievas pediatric clinic, part of Ukraines Dobrobut health group, was one of thousands of victims of the data-scrambling software dubbed Nyetya that erupted June 27. Unlike WannaCry, a similarly quick-spreading digital worm that also disrupted hospital work earlier this year, Nyetyas masters appear to have had the ability to draw data from their targets meaning they either knew or could have discovered who would be at the receiving end of their attack.

Podkopaieva said the disruption to Dobrobut was considerable.

VIDEO:Sophisticated cyberattack cripples computers across the globe

For a moment, we were blind and deaf, she told The Associated Press in an interview at her clinic a week after the attack. Across Dobrobut, a CT scanner, a mammography machine and four X-ray machines were disabled after the worm crippled the Windows computers they were connected to. One patient had just finished being X-rayed when the cyberattack destroyed their scan, she said. Overall, about 100 examinations had to be cancelled.

READ MORE:Cyberattack spreading across the world, now in the U.S.

Dobrobut wasnt alone. Ukraines Ministry of Health says public hospitals werent touched, but at least two other private medical institutions in Kyiv were also affected, according to the Ukrainian website Censor.NET, which published a running tally of affected firms. The media group said several pharmaceutical companies also were affected by Nyetya and anecdotal evidence suggests pharmacies across Ukraine experienced shortages when the cyberattack derailed deliveries of medication.

Volodymyr Varenytsia, who runs a drug store in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, said he ran out of iodine and Citramon, a headache medicine, in the days after June 27. The shortage lasted until deliveries resumed a full week later. Meanwhile, he had to turn some clients away empty-handed.

People suffered because of this virus, he said in a telephone interview.

Podkopaievas clinic recovered faster.

READ MORE:Small businesses often more vulnerable to cyberattacks, experts say

She said staff moved swiftly and calmly to restore her facilitys systems and work around faults. Even when diagnostic work was cancelled, every patient was still seen by a professional. Doctors wrote information down on paper, just as they had in the years before the hospital went digital. Within a day, the appointment system had been restored and by June 30, Podkopaieva finally ordered the instruments she was sending for when her computer went dead. They arrived that evening.

We had good backups, which helped in part, she explained. Training helped too, she said, even if we never expected that medical organizations would be affected by a cyberattack.

That anyone might be held accountable for the disruption seems unlikely.

READ MORE:Bank of Canada warns financial sector vulnerable to cyberattacks

Ukrainian officials have laid the blame for Nyetya at Moscows door, but Russian officials have denied any responsibility, and in any case hackers who operate at the scale of the June attack are notoriously difficult to bring to justice.

Even verbal condemnation has been hard to come by. U.S. officials have said nothing about the attack on Ukrainian medical facilities and little about the outbreak in Ukraine in general, despite the fact that spillover from the digital outbreak snarled traffic at American ports formally considered critical national infrastructure and disrupted several U.S. multinationals. A small U.S. care network, the Heritage Valley Health System, was also affected, with several operations rescheduled.

Academics said President Donald Trumps administration was inviting trouble by not reacting publicly to cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure, whether at home or abroad.

Scott Shackelford, the chair of the Cybersecurity Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, said that the past progress toward setting international norms for behaviour in cyberspace is in danger of eroding.

Whats needed is leadership, and right now thats in dangerously short supply, especially coming from Washington, he said.

Hollis, the Temple professor, said American leaders at the very least needed to speak up.

Were in this era right now thats almost a constitutional moment for cybersecurity and cyberspace, he said. When youre silent in the face of bad behaviour, that does sort of imply that its permissible.

2017The Canadian Press

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Cyberattacks targeting clinics in Ukraine draws concerns from experts - Globalnews.ca

John Bruton

John Bruton is a former Irish prime minister and an international business leader. He has held a number of posts in Irish government, including minist

In some circumstances, Ukrainian membership of the EU could benefit Russia, but no one in Moscow sees it that way.

Control over Ukraines fertile land and natural resources has been a source of conflict throughout modern history. The Russian occupation of Crimea, which is part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, is the first forcible alteration of an international boundary in Europe since the end of World War II. In eastern Ukraine, the conflict between Russian-backed militias and the Ukrainian government led to the shooting down by militantsof a passenger airliner full of Dutch holidaymakers heading to the Far East.

Ukraine is a democracy, but it is afflicted by corruption and the constant tension between its president and its legislature under its US-style constitution. The country looks to the European Union for salvation, but the EU is turning inward and giving priority to other problems.

In an attempt to understand the challenge, I read The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy. It explores the history of Ukraine from the earliest times, and Plokhy is a professor of history at Harvard.

At the outset of the First World War, Ukraine was divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Catholic Church which is in communion with Rome but following eastern rite are active in Ukraine, and religious divisions have been a source of conflict in the past.

Both Russian and Ukrainian languages are spoken in the country, with Russian more in the cities and in the east. The Ukrainian language is now promoted as a badge of national identity, as Irish is in Ireland. Thanks to immigration from Russia, the country is ethnically diverse. But partly because of high-handed Russian actions, even ethnic Russians in Ukraine increasingly identify themselves as Ukrainian.

Plokhy traces the cultural and political influences that shaped the country in the past two millennia. Ukraine was on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. It came under the influence of Greeks of the Byzantine Empire from Constantinople, who introduced Christianity to the area in 989 AD. It was from Ukraine that Christianity was introduced to Russia, which partly explains the Russian view that Ukraine should not be separate from Mother Russia.

In 1240, Kiev fell to the Mongols, who ruled the area for 100 years. The Mongols were defeated in 1359 and Ukraine became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was dominated by Poles and Lithuanians. The Grand Duchys Catholic religious policy was resented by Orthodox Ukrainians.

From 1590 to 1646, a series of risings by Cossacks (armed bands of native Ukrainians) weakened the Grand Duchy and oriented Ukraine toward Moscow and the Orthodox Church. The autonomy enjoyed by the Cossacks within the Russian Empire was ended by Catherine the Great in the 1770s, and that fueled resentment.

Plokhy describes the tragedy of the First World War, when Ukrainians fought on both sides. At the end of the conflict, and during the Russian Civil War, Ukraine briefly became an independent state. That independence was ended by the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war.

The author shows how the Jews, who were numerous in Ukraine, became scapegoats. Under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, the country suffered a terrible famine because communist determination diverted food supplies into the cities to help industrial expansion.

During the Second World War, which was fought over the territory of Ukraine, nationalists in that country took up arms for the independence of their own nation, against both the Nazis and the Soviets. The pro-independence movement fighting the Soviets continued well into the 1950s, but without any aid from the West.

Ukraine did comparatively well when Stalins successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and his protg, Leonid Brezhnev, were in charge of the Soviet Union. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, things got worse for Ukraine, especially in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which affected 3 million people in the country and where the risks to the population were partially covered up by the regime.

While it was the Baltic states and the Russian Federation led by Boris Yeltsin that precipitated the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine took full advantage of it and declared itself independent in 1991. Interestingly, the United States favored independence for the Baltic states but opposed it for Ukraine at that time. President George H.W. Bush foresaw the effect Ukrainian independence would have on Russian opinion.

As an independent country, Ukraine shared the economic collapse in most post-Soviet states caused by the stress of adjusting from a communist system to a market economy. Unlike Russia, Ukraine does not have vast natural gas reserves but, also unlike Russia, it has remained a democracy.

This is an important book because it deals with a country that could become a source of conflict between EU members and the Russian Federation in the foreseeable future. Moscow feels that Ukraine should be part of its sphere of influence, but Brussels rejects the notion of spheres of influence.Many in the union believe Ukraine could eventually be eligible to become an EU member something that most Ukrainians would like but the Russians would hate.

In some circumstances, Ukrainian membership of the EU could benefit Russia, but no one in Moscow sees it that way at least not yet.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Enrique Ramos / Shutterstock.com

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Ukraine: A Key to Europe's Future - Fair Observer

The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine announced proposals to abolish Ukraine and create a new state in its place on Tuesday, comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko dismissed the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of "a puppet show", with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message.

Ukrainian officials said Russia wanted to show the world, and the United States especially, it could keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue.

Zakharchenko, who scarcely would have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kiev, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk.

Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire and is one which many Ukrainians today regard as offensive.

"We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal," Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy.

He said the move was backed by delegates from different Ukrainian regions, though a statement from the neighboring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative.

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Pro-Russian rebel leader in E. Ukraine unveils plan for new state - CNBC

Aljazeera.com

On the front line of Ukraine's ceasefire BBC News It's three years since Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down in eastern Ukraine, leaving 298 people dead. A Dutch-led investigation found that the missile which hit the plane had been brought from Russia and fired from territory controlled by ... Ukraine wants Russia held to account over MH17 downingAljazeera.com MH17 Ukraine plane crash: Dead remembered amid tears and sunflowersBBC News Dutch unveil memorial for victims of Ukraine airplane crashReuters Hong Kong Standard (press release) all 185 news articles »

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On the front line of Ukraine's ceasefire - BBC News