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Background

Due to ongoing instability and conflict in Ukraine since April 2014, areas primarily in the eastern part of the country have experienced a deteriorating humanitarian situation. Heavy shelling and armed conflict has led to significant displacement of people. Unfortunately, political negotiations conducted have not succeeded so far in ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The humanitarian crisis is becoming extended, insecurity and humanitarian suffering continue to be a fact of life for many in the east. In the planning figures for the revised Humanitarian Response Plan for 2016, 3.1 million people are estimated to be in need, including 1.6 million internally displaced people (IDPs). As the conflict continues and being even intensified in May-July 2016, the political and security agendas continue to prevail over the humanitarian one. The population in the most affected areas, Donetsk and Luhansk, continue to experience limited or no access to humanitarian aid, including basic life-saving services, and face constant security threats challenging humanitarian operations. The operating environment in those two districts remain volatile, with significant implications on the protection of civilians and aid workers, on the assessment of needs and on the delivery of assistance. Shelling affects infrastructure and hampers road access to deliver humanitarian assistance to people remaining in the conflict zone. So far, the following Clusters remain to be activated in the country: Education; Shelter & NFIs; Food Security; Health & Nutrition; Protection, WASH, and Logistics Cluster, officially activated on 18 February 2015.

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Ukraine - Humanitarian Response Concept of Operations, 23 February 2017 - ReliefWeb

BRUSSELS -- The Netherlands' lower house of parliament has voted for the ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, leaving a vote in the upper house -- the Dutch Senate -- as a final hurdle before the deal, which was signed in March 2014, finally can enter into force.

It has been expected that the House of Representatives would vote in favor of the deal, as the governing coalition enjoys a majority there.

The Senate vote is expected to take place only after the next month's parliamentary elections in the Netherlands on March 15, despite the fact that the composition of the Senate isn't affected by the general election.

The Netherlands is the only EU country that still hasn't ratified the Association Agreement with Ukraine after 61 percent voted against it in a citizen-driven referendum in the country in April 2016.

Although the result was consultative, the Dutch government decided to negotiate a legally binding supplement to the Association Agreement with the other 27 EU member states.

The supplement, which does not change the text of the actual agreement, was adopted at an EU summit in Brussels in December 2016 and outlined, among other things, that the EU-Ukraine deal doesn't give Kyiv the right to EU membership or guarantees of military support from the EU.

Link:
Dutch Lawmakers Vote In Favor Of EU-Ukraine Deal - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

KIEV A Ukrainian lawmaker kidnapped in the southern city of Odessa earlier on Thursday has been found unharmed and his attackers have been detained, the local prosecutor's office said.

Earlier, the head of President Petro Poroshenko's BPP faction, Ihor Hryniv, told parliament that MP Oleksiy Honcharenko had been kidnapped "in broad daylight" in his native Odessa.

"The criminal group has been neutralized. Honcharenko is in a safe place," said Inna Verba, a spokeswoman for the Odessa prosecutor's office.

Thirty-six-year-old Honcharenko used to be in the pro-Russian Party of Regions, but joined Poroshenko's faction following the 'Maidan' uprising in 2014, becoming a vocal opponent of the Russia-backed separatist movement in eastern Ukraine.

Speaking to Reuters by phone, Verba said Honcharenko had been targeted because of his political position, but did not give further details on the alleged motive.

"They wanted to burn his eyes with acid and break his knees so that he suffered. They didn't plan to kill him," she said.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

BEIRUT/ISTANBUL An Islamic State car bomb killed more than 50 people on Friday in a Syrian village held by rebels, a war monitor said, a day after the jihadist group was driven from its last stronghold in the area.

DAKAR Funds from a dollar bank account in the name of the Jammeh Foundation for Peace, a charity founded by Gambia's former president Yahya Jammeh, flowed to Jammeh himself, not to foundation projects, according to bank records and interviews with a former charity official and a former presidential staff member.

MANILA A Philippine senator and staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs was in police custody on Friday following her high-profile arrest for drugs offences that she described as a vendetta that would fail to silence her.

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Kidnapped Ukrainian MP found unharmed, attackers detained: prosecutor - Reuters

A day after the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) warned the ceasefire had failed, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel urged Kiev and Moscow to hold fast to the agreement.

Despite assurances given by both parties, he said, the "ceasefire is not holding."

"We can only urgently appeal to both sides to implement the agreements we have reached -- otherwise, we will risk an intensified military escalation with many other civilian victims and a continuation of the standstill in the political process," Gabriel said in a statement.

"Even the most intense negotiating efforts are in vain when there is no political will to implement them."

Both sides had agreed to the withdrawal of "heavy weapons and full compliance" with the ceasefire, which was supposed to start Monday, Gabriel said.

Speaking Tuesday at the headquarters of the United Nations, OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier revealed there had been "no signs of the withdrawal of the weapons."

"The crisis in and around the Ukraine continues to be a major source of tension and instability in Europe," he said.

Zannier had been invited by the Ukraine delegation of the Security Council to speak before the chamber.

He told the Security Council that the OSCE was "monitoring the ceasefire and are ready to observe the much-needed withdrawal of heavy weapons."

Zannier told reporters that there continued to be a number of violations and that the impact on civilians in the disputed regions was becoming "increasingly significant."

"We will need to keep pushing and activate the international community also to put pressure on the sides to implement" steps to ensure the ceasefire holds.

His appearance came just before the organization's principle deputy chief monitor told CNN that there were about 200 ceasefire violations overnight Tuesday local time. The number is in addition to hundreds more observed since the ceasefire nominally began Monday.

Alexander Hug, principle deputy chief monitor of the OSCE's special monitoring mission to Ukraine, told CNN's Clare Sebastian that about 100 of those violations were explosions, indicating that heavy weaponry, such as tanks and mortars, is still in place.

Unlike the last few weeks, when critical infrastructure was cut off, there is no immediate crisis as of now, but any of these explosions could knock out a power line and make things worse, Hug added.

Zannier said relations between the West and Russia remain "strongly adversarial" and that "in Europe, we increasingly see the impact of an approach to the post-Cold War phase (of cooperation) with a Cold War mentality."

Zannier said there was a "very real risk of escalation" in fighting in the region and that Russian President Vladimir Putin's executive order to recognize travel documents from the de facto, pro-Russian separatist authorities in disputed areas of eastern Ukraine "complicates the implementation of the Minsk agreement."

Putin effectively withdrew from the Minsk agreement last week by signing an executive order recognizing travel documents issued by separatist authorities in the region.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Russia is recognizing the travel documents "for humanitarian reasons."

But at a Security Council briefing Wednesday, the Ukrainian delegation said Russia isn't fully living up to its end of the deal.

"Instead of full and good-faith implementation of the Minsk commitments, Russia resorts to political and military provocations, blackmail and political pressure," the delegation said in a statement.

In addition, Ukraine said, the Trilateral Contact Group -- representatives of Ukraine, Russia and OSCE -- "should pay particular attention to achieving immediate and unconditional release of Ukrainian citizens, who remain illegally detained as hostages or political prisoners in the occupied areas of Donbas and in Crimea, as well as in the Russian Federation."

The Minsk agreement, which was negotiated in 2014 but never fully implemented, calls for the "bilateral cessation of the use of all weapons," and the decentralization of power in the region "with respect to the temporary status of local self-government in certain areas of the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions."

At the time, then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk spoke of the deal with guarded optimism.

"We had just two options: bad, and worse," he said. "So we decided at this particular period of time to get the bad option. Probably this option will save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers, and I hope this option will save lives of Ukrainian civilians, of innocent people, who are under a constant shelling of Russian-led terrorists."

"It's better to have this new deal rather than not to have (it)," he said. "But we do not trust any words or any papers. We are to trust only actions and deeds."

CNN's Richard Roth contributed to this report.

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Ukraine ceasefire: No sign of weapons withdrawal, official says - CNN

The Ukrainian term Holodomor has yet to enter the worlds genocide vocabulary, as Shoah and Cambodia and Rwanda have done. But we should hope that the world soon becomes as familiar with the Holodomor as it has with the Holocaust: not for the sake of a comparative wickedness contest and still less to deny the singular character of Hitlers Final Solution, but to honor the victims of one of the most pitiless exterminations of a population in history and to take from their awful fate some important lessons for the future.

Starvation is a terrible way to die, which is why the Nazis used the starvation bunker in Auschwitz I as a weapon against prisoner rebellion: Revolt, and you will die a slow, agonizing death, your humanity degraded to an animalistic level. Yet what happened in Cell 18, Block 11 of KL-Auschwitz to a few men at a time (including Saint Maximilian Kolbe) was deliberately inflicted on millions of Ukrainians in 193233 by the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. As with all such clandestine slaughters this one hidden with the connivance of such regime toadies as Walter Duranty of the New York Times, whose ill-gotten Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked there are disputes about the body count. The (very) low-end figure has 2.5 million Ukrainians starved as an act of Soviet state policy, while reputable demographic studies suggest that as many as 10 million innocents died in the Holodomor.

There was nothing accidental about the Ukrainian terror famine. While inadequate harvests played their part at the outset of the slaughter, the state policy was clear Ukraine was to be systematically depopulated by starvation as a means of reinforcing Soviet control over a population that had briefly tasted national freedom and independence in the post-Romanov, postWorld War I chaos following the breakup of the old Russian Empire. And while there was a Marxist-ideological element in this lethally systematic cruelty the kulaks or rich peasants were one target of Stalins policy it also seems clear that ethno-racism and atheistic passions played a significant role in the decision to starve millions to death. These Ukrainians were, after all, mere little brothers of the Great Russians, lower life forms who, in addition to their ethnic deficiencies, stubbornly clung to their faith, their icons, their sacraments, and their priests in the worlds first officially atheist state. That this policy of feed-the-Russians-first-by-starving-the-Ukrainians was ordered by a native Georgian (Stalin) was perhaps bitterly ironic; but then Stalin, the former czarist prisoner, was eager to confirm his position, not only as Lenins ideological heir, but as the father of the Great Russian fatherland which required him to deny the reality of Ukraines unique nationality and culture, and its formative role in the history of the eastern Slavs.

A recently released feature film, Bitter Harvest, tries to bring a human texture and a certain comprehensibility to this almost incomprehensible tale of systematic, state-sponsored mass starvation, telling the story of the worst period of the Holodomor (when some 30,000 Ukrainians starved to death every day) through the lives of two young lovers, one of whom is transformed from artist to anti-Soviet partisan in response to the horrors he sees as the starvation policy begins to take its human toll. The film, while perhaps not great cinema, succeeds in personalizing the Holodomor and reminding us that this genocide happened, literally, one person at a time, as an elderly peasant, a child, or a wife and mother each died from state-induced malnutrition and starvation, wasting away to nothingness while Soviet thugs blocked the borders of Ukraine to prevent their escape and ruthlessly expropriated (or destroyed) every possible foodstuff in order to bring Ukraine to heel. Those who want to honor the innocent dead by learning the story of the Holodomor in full would do well to read Robert Conquests pioneering study of the Ukrainian terror famine, Harvest of Sorrow, or the more recent Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. But for a mass audience, Bitter Harvest will, one hopes, do for the Holodomor what the 1978 television series Holocaust and Stephen Spielbergs film Schindlers List did for the Shoah: bring such hard-to-conceive awfulness home, making it real in microcosm.

That remembering is important in itself, as an act of solidarity with the dead. It is also important as America and the West consider their response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine that began three years ago this month. For while Putins war in eastern Ukraine has not taken anything close to the toll of the Holodomor, it has rung up a serious butchers bill: Ten thousand dead and 23,000 wounded, with 1.8 million internally displaced persons trying to rebuild their lives in other parts of Ukraine. And as Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty points out, this is not (as so many in supine, feckless, or mindless Western political circles seem to think) the Ukraine conflict. This is, as Whitmore puts it, a war on Ukraine, and it is a war of choice. So was the Holodomor.

Moreover, the 21st-century war on Ukraine is the result of one mans deliberate policy, as was the terror famine of the 1930s. Then the perpetrator was Stalin; today, the perpetrator is Vladimir Putin, who, it will be remembered, has not been loath to see a rehabilitation of Stalins memory and image in his new Russia. And it is not difficult to find a further parallel.

Stalins war on Ukraine was motivated in part by his insistence that Ukraine was not a national reality deserving of independence. Putin, for his part, has said that Ukraine isnt a real country. For men of power without consciences, it is a short step from saying that Ukraine is not a real country to ordering the murder of Ukrainians, in their thousands or their millions. And to what end? To secure the Soviet empire, then, or recreate it in 21st-century form, now.

That ought not be an option the West is prepared to tolerate, for obvious strategic reasons and in fidelity to its own professed ideals.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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Bitter Harvest and the Bitter Present in Ukraine - National Review