According to Refat Chubarov, the president of the Crimean Tatar World Congress and the elected chairperson of the Mejlis (the quasi-governing assembly of the Crimean Tatars), the Russian Federation is in the process of creating a Crimean Tatar military corps to neutralize protests and counter... MORE

The top leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine (the “Normandy Group”) conferred by telephone on the night of May 23–24, at Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s initiative. Poroshenko sought an endorsement of Kyiv’s proposal for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland held talks, in Moscow, with Russian presidential advisor Vladislav Surkov, on May 17–18 (see Part One). According to the United States government’s official account of the meeting, the talks focused on... MORE

Informal discussions are sputtering along between Washington and Moscow over implementation of the Minsk armistice in Ukraine. This bilateral process originated in May 2015 as an accompaniment to the Barack Obama administration’s decision to seek Russia’s “help” on Syria. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland... MORE

Nadezhda Savchenko, a Ukrainian air force helicopter pilot, was captured by Moscow-backed separatist forces during fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in the summer of 2014, and ended up in a Russian jail. Savchenko was serving in Donbas as a volunteer soldier with... MORE

The European Union and the United States are intensifying their appeals on Minsk to ensure transparency and democratic standards during the parliamentary elections scheduled for September 11. Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State Bridget Brink and Robert Berschinski traveled to Minsk on May 17–18. During their... MORE

The bout of great-power euphoria sparked by the 2014 annexation of Crimea did not last long in Russia. The Kremlin quickly realized the region’s total dependence on mainland Ukraine. Over the past 60 years, heavy capital and labor investments as well as regular water, power... MORE

Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine held an expanded meeting of their foreign affairs ministers and senior staffs on May 11 in Berlin (the “Normandy” format). Two overlapping issues topped the meeting’s agenda: possible “elections” in the Russian-controlled Donetsk-Luhansk territory, and policing those proposed elections to... MORE

The “Normandy” powers’ (Ukraine, Germany, France, Russia) latest meeting, in Berlin, on May 11, which failed to address Ukraine’s concerns, has stiffened Kyiv’s refusal to go along with local “elections” in the Donetsk and Luhansk “peoples’ republics” (DPR, LPR). That territory is Ukrainian de jure... MORE

Five and a half years after the 2010 presidential elections, which culminated in street protests, violence, police crackdowns and Western sanctions on Belarus, the intensity of both official and unofficial contacts between Minsk and the West are at an all-time high. One telling recent example... MORE