What Are Russia's Real Goals in Ukraine? Wall Street Journal In Ukraine Must Make Painful Compromises for Peace With Russia (op-ed, Dec. 30), Victor Pinchuk appeals to the international community for a new start in attempting to end the war in Ukraine, stressing the inevitability of painful compromises for ... |
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What Are Russia's Real Goals in Ukraine? - Wall Street Journal
Vyacheslav, a building engineer, in his apartment, Kiev, 2015.
Credit Andrey Lomakin
Ukraine has long had a tricky relationship with guns. In the course of its post-Soviet history, it has been the only country in Europe without legislation governing the civilian possession of firearms. More than a dozen laws have been proposed, but none have been passed by parliament. Instead, Ukrainian gun ownership is regulated by ordinances overseen by the interior ministry. Officially, the only legal way to own a firearm in Ukraine today is to acquire a rifle for hunting or sporting purposes; handguns are banned, available only to security guards and certain categories of state officials.
Those, at least, are the rules on paper. But the war in Ukraines easta grinding conflict between pro-Kiev forces and Russia-backed separatists that has left ten thousand people deadhas made an absurd mockery of these regulations. In the conflicts early days, when the Ukrainian military was in disarray after the Maidan Revolution and Russias annexation of Crimea, much of the fighting was carried out by members of hastily assembled volunteer battalions. Those battalions had an unclear legal status and were not always well equipped; their weapons and supplies came from donations, private supplies, and the black market. Since 2014, when war broke out in the Donbass region, huge caches of firearms have poured into the conflict zone. Today, after numerous shaky ceasefires and direct incursions of Russian soldiers and artillery, a tense, often-deadly stasis has taken hold, and the military weapons are increasingly flooding out of the conflict zone and into the hands of civilians.
According to the Ukrainian photographer Andrey Lomakin, who photographed civilian gun owners in their homes, in 2014 and 2015, the insecurity and trauma of the war have made firearms in Ukraine a kind of modern amulet, awarding their owners an extra power. Not everyone is comfortable to point it at the aggressor and shoot, he has written. But everyone feels safer having one. Lomakin, who is forty-three years old, grew up in Kiev, and remembers his schoolboy lessons in how to assemble a Kalashnikov rifle with his eyes closed, part of mandatory Soviet-era military training. Back then, Lomakin recalls, guns had a foreboding mystiqueyet these days, he says, they have become alarmingly ordinary. He has seen a growing number of otherwise law-abiding citizens looking to buy guns, both legally and on the black market. Last year, the head of a Ukrainian association of gun owners told the Associated Press that the country contained as many as five million illegal firearms. Ukraine has turned into a supermarket for illegal weapons, he said.
Lomakins project, titled Amulet, documents the magnified role of the gun in todays Ukraine. In one image, a father stands at home, cradling his young child, while his wife and three other children sit on the couch. Its a bucolic family scene, made visually dissonant only by fact that in the fathers other arm is a black assault rifle. In another image, a woman poses in her bedroom, an ironing board resting against the pastel-colored walls; her face is stern and her arms are folded across her chest, holding a pistol in domestic repose. Ukraine to date has no functioning national registry of gun owners, and so the issue remainslike the marketplace that fuels itin the shadows. Lomakins portraits provide a visual record of how Ukrainians have been changed over the past three years, becoming at once wounded and disoriented, inured to the spectre of violence while trying to remain vigilant against it.
By Diyar Guldogan
ANKARA
Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Wednesday the situation in Ukraine over a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande.
"Dissatisfaction was expressed with the general situation surrounding the settlement of the Ukraine crisis," the Kremlin said in a statement.
The leaders discussed the progress toward implementing the Minsk agreements, including Normandy format summit which was held in Berlin on Oct. 19.
Putin, Merkel, Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gathered in Berlin for the first time in more than a year for a four-party meeting, amid intensified fighting in eastern Ukraine between government troops and pro-Russian separatists.
"There was an emphasis on the importance of stepping up joint efforts to de-escalate tensions in southeastern Ukraine and ensuring consistent implementation of the Minsk-2 provisions," it added.
The leaders also agreed on giving an "additional impetus" to the Normandy format activities and holding meetings at various level in the upcoming period.
Ukraine has been wracked by conflict since March 2014 following Russias annexation of Crimea after an illegal independence vote on the heels of violent anti-government protests which led to the overthrow of the then-President Victor Yanukovich.
The UN General Assembly had voted nearly unanimously to proclaim the Russian annexation as illegal.
Along with many UN countries, the U.S., the EU, and Turkey also do not recognize Crimea as Russian territory.
Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russia separatists has seen around 9,750 killed, according to the UN.
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Putin, Merkel, Hollande discuss situation in Ukraine - Anadolu Agency
(Kyiv) An order from Ukrainian authorities banning the Russian independent television channel Dozhd TV (TV Rain) from broadcasting on Ukrainian cable networks violates freedom of expression and should be revoked, Human Rights Watch said today. In Russia, Dozhd TV is accessible only by streaming it over the internet since the Russian authorities orchestrated its cutoff from satellite and cable providers in 2014, as part of the Kremlins crackdown on independently owned television channels.
It is profoundly disappointing to see that Ukrainian authorities are following the Kremlins example in silencing media they dont like, said Tanya Cooper, Ukraine researcher at Human Rights Watch. Media should not be used as a scapegoat in political bargaining.
A statement on the Dozhd TV website on January 12, 2017, said that its Ukrainian cable provider, Volya, notified the station that Ukraines National Radio and TV Council had issued an order to stop Dozhd TV broadcasts. The council said cable providers have one month to implement the order from the date it was published. The Dozhd TV statement said a Volya representative informed the station the ban was issued because Dozhd TV had violated Ukraines advertising regulations.
A participant holds a flyer during a protest against the threat of closure to television station Dozhd (TV Rain) in Moscow February 8, 2014. The flyer reads "We need Dozhd".
2014 Reuters
However, in an interview with wire service Interfax-Ukraine, a member of the National Radio and TV Council stated that Dozhd TV was banned also for identifying Crimea as a part of Russias territory in its broadcasts. He also said that Dozhd TV correspondents had travelled to Crimea directly from Russia several times, a violation of Ukrainian law.
Russia has occupied the Crimean Peninsula since 2014. In its World Report 2017, Human Rights Watch concluded that Russias actions in occupied Crimea created a human rights crisis.
A Dozhd TV representative told Human Rights Watch that Ukraines National Radio and TV Council contacted the television channel and asked it to address violations of advertising regulations, which prohibit media from non-EU countries or countries that have not ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television from broadcasting advertisements. The Dozhd TV representative said the station had addressed this violation and notified Ukraines National Radio and TV Council. The representative said that Ukrainian authorities had not contacted the channel since then to either express further concerns or to offer an alternative to blocking Dozhd TV broadcasts in Ukraine.
Natalia Sindeyeva, director general of Dozhd TV, said in the January 12 statement that she regretted that the National Council of Ukraine came to such a decision. According to Dozhd TV, about 90 cable providers broadcast Dozhd TV in Ukraine, reaching approximately half a million households.
In early 2014, after a public outcry by several Russian lawmakers and an investigation by the state media oversight agency (Roskomnadzor), Russian cable providers stopped broadcasting Dozhd TV. In November 2016, security officials of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic (DNR) arbitrarily detained two Dozhd TV journalists, deleted their footage, and banned them indefinitely from returning to the area.
In Ukraine, media freedom remains problematic. In June 2016, a presidential decree banned 17 Russian journalists, editors, and media executives from travelling to Ukraine. In September 2015, the government banned several hundred Russian individuals and legal entities from entering Ukraine for a year. Among them were 41 journalists and bloggers from several countries, including Russia, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Germany. In May 2016, President Petro Poroshenko removed 29 people from the list of those sanctioned.
The international organizations Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued statements urging the Ukrainian government to drop the ban against Dozhd TV. On Twitter, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europes media freedom representative described the decision as very damaging for media pluralism in Ukraine.
Media serves as an essential check on government power, abuses, and many other issues, Cooper said. Protecting media freedom will set Ukraine on the right course for further meaningful reform and human rights-based policies.
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Ukraine: TV Channel Ordered Banned - Human Rights Watch
KIEV/MILAN A power blackout in Ukraine's capital Kiev last month was caused by a cyber attack and investigators are trying to trace other potentially infected computers and establish the source of the breach, utility Ukrenergo told Reuters on Wednesday.
When the lights went out in northern Kiev on Dec. 17-18, power supplier Ukrenergo suspected a cyber attack and hired investigators to help it determine the cause following a series of breaches across Ukraine.
Preliminary findings indicate that workstations and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, linked to the 330 kilowatt sub-station "North", were influenced by external sources outside normal parameters, Ukrenergo said in comments emailed to Reuters.
"The analysis of the impact of symptoms on the initial data of these systems indicates a premeditated and multi-level invasion," Ukrenergo said.
Law enforcement officials and cyber experts are still working to compile a chronology of events, draw up a list of compromised accounts, and determine the penetration point, while tracing computers potentially infected with malware in sleep mode, it said.
The comments make no mention of which individual, group or country may have been behind the attack.
"It was an intentional cyber incident not meant to be on a large scale... they actually attacked more but couldn't achieve all their goals," said Marina Krotofil, lead cyber-security researcher at Honeywell, who assisted in the investigation.
In December 2015, a first-of-its-kind cyber attack cut the lights to 225,000 people in western Ukraine, with hackers also sabotaging power distribution equipment, complicating attempts to restore power.
Ukrainian security services blamed that attack on Russia.
In the latest attack, hackers are thought to have hidden in Ukrenergo's IT network undetected for six months, acquiring privileges to access systems and figure out their workings, before taking methodical steps to take the power offline, Krotofil said.
"The team involved had quite a few people working in it, with very serious tools and an engineer who understands the power infrastructure," she said.
The attacks against Ukraine's power grid are widely seen by experts as the first examples of hackers shutting off critical energy systems supplying heat and light to millions of homes.
(Writing by Oleg Vukmanovic; reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kiev, Oleg Vukmanovic and Stephen Jewkes in Milan; editing by Susan Fenton/Ruth Pitchford)
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Ukraine's power outage was a cyber attack: Ukrenergo - Reuters