The Ukrainian parliament elected on September 30 will gather for its first sitting on Friday, November 23. It should elect a speaker and start forming a new cabinet. The constitution requires the sitting cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych to step down before the new... MORE

On November 11 a powerful storm arose in the northeastern Black Sea. By the end of it, Russia and Ukraine faced serious environmental damage from an oil spill and a potentially acrimonious diplomatic situation. According to Ukraine's Emergency Situations Ministry, after the storm four ships... MORE

Ethnic tension has increased in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula as the authorities move to tackle the problem of Crimean Tatar squatters occupying local plots of land. In early November, Tatars were forcibly evicted from two construction sites that, according to the Crimean authorities and the local... MORE

Russia’s top officials are loudly complaining about Kyiv’s tactics in a bitter dispute over Ukraine’s Kremenchug refinery, pledging to defend the interests of the Russian shareholders there. The incident is just the latest irritant in an already uneasy energy relationship between the two neighbors. “I... MORE

The Ukrainian government has simplified the procedure allowing the special services and police to procure confidential information about citizens. Ukrainian human rights activists and Internet providers believe that the government violated the constitution by legalizing widespread surveillance, giving the secret services almost unlimited access to... MORE

Friday, November 2, was the last day that the Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defense (NUNS) bloc could collect signatures to support a “democratic” (orange) coalition with the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT). BYuT deputies have openly expressed their fear that disunity in NUNS will lead to an... MORE

A coalition consisting of President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense bloc (NUNS) and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT) is showing cracks long before the newly elected parliament even has its first meeting, which is expected in late November. There is no unity of opinion among... MORE

President Viktor Yushchenko’s recent efforts to commemorate World War II nationalist fighters have provoked a wave of pro-Russian and leftist extremism in Ukraine. Radical leftists disrupted commemorations of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) across Ukraine on October 14, and the Russian radical nationalist organization Eurasian... MORE

At a press conference broadcast for the Russian media on October 12, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka criticized living conditions in the town of Babruisk, one of the centers visited by 70 visiting Russian journalists (SB-Belarus' Segodnya, October 13). The translated version of his remarks was... MORE