• Ukrainian politician: pressure and sanctions will force Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine

    Pressure and sanctions against Russia should lead to the return of Crimea to Ukraine, as stated by the Ukrainian Deputy Minister on issues of the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons, Yuri Hrymchak in an interview with Apostrophe.

    "I believe that at some point keeping the occupied Crimea will become so toxic to the Russian Federation that abandoning it will be a salvation for Russia itself as a state," Hrymchak said.

    According to the Deputy Minister, a similar …

  • Lithuania intends to demand the seizure of Gazprom's European property

    Lithuania accused Gazprom of abuse of its monopoly position in the natural gas market and imposed a fine of EUR 42 million, TASS reports. Vilnius expects to collect the fine using Gazprom’s property in other European countries.

    Lithuanian Ministry of Justice has prepared a special action plan for the recovery of the fine and any accrued interest. The plan outlines the actions of various Lithuanian ministries and departments. The accusations of Lithuania relate to the events of 2012, when the …

  • Volker: By dragging out conflict, Russia wants to involve DPR and LPR in discussion of peacekeeping

    The main difficulty in working to resolve the crisis in Donbas is that Russia continues to deny its role in the fighting, stated Kurt Volker, the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, as reported by Voice of America.

    “Russia is continuing to deny its own role in this and that it has nothing to do with the separatist governments that it has set up, and that it changes the leaders at will as they did in Luhansk just last month,” Volker said.

    According to him, by dragging out the …

  • Kremlin: US national security strategy has an 'imperial nature'

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has said that the new US national security strategy "is of an imperial nature, and shows a persistent unwillingness to abandon a unipolar world", TASS news agency reports.

    "A cursory reading of [the strategy], particularly those parts in which our country is mentioned in one way or another, in general [shows that] the imperial nature of the document is evident; there is an unwillingness to abandon the unipolar world, with …

  • Russia presents Tajikistan with a shipment of heavy weapons

    The Ministry of Defense of Russia has shipped a batch of small arms, artillery, armored hardware, anti-aircraft weapons and also paramedical, land surveying and other equipment, for free, to its counterpart in the Republic of Tajikistan, t RBC news agency reported cutting the Russian Ministry of Defense.

    In particular, the Tajik Army received three T-72B1 tanks, nine BTR-80, BTR-70 armored personnel carriers, BMP-2 armored fighting vehicles, three D-30 howitzers, three 23M1 air-defense systems, …