On September 10, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a bill on sanctions against Russia (president.gov.ua, September 10). The law was published in official newspapers on September 11, which gave Poroshenko legal grounds to, as soon as September 12, slap sanctions on Russia for... MORE

On September 5, Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and leaders of the Moscow-backed separatist “governments” signed an armistice agreement in Minsk. The armistice protocol’s Point 4 envisages a “permanent monitoring [of the situation] along the border between Russia and... MORE

The ceasefire agreement signed in Minsk, on September 5, by representatives of Ukraine, Russia and Moscow-backed rebels operating in Ukraine’s Donbas region (area including Luhansk and Donetsk provinces) seems to be holding. Yet, serious problems of implementation persist among the different parties to the somewhat... MORE

In July 2014, when the war in eastern Ukraine was becoming increasingly intense and bitter, former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili accused the new Georgian authorities of persecuting “the officers of the armed forces that came to Ukraine to consult the Ukrainians during the fighting.”... MORE

Ukraine has been “coerced to peace” by Russia after five months of hostilities, as Georgia was in 2008 after five days. Russia’s hybrid war methods, rehearsed already against Georgia and deployed fully against Ukraine, proved indecisive, until Russia escalated to the level of conventional war... MORE

The September 5 Minsk meeting of the Contact Group (CG) on Ukraine that resulted in a ceasefire deal continues to reverberate in the global media as does the overall conflict in Ukraine. For Belarus, two sets of issues appear noteworthy: the statements of the meeting’s... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin undoubtedly timed the coordinated effort to initiate a ceasefire in southeastern Ukraine to coincide with both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) September 4-5 summit in Newport, Wales, and the European Union’s threat of additional sanctions against his country. However, due... MORE

The Ukrainian crisis has overshadowed the continuing low-level insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus. Besides shifting public attention, the conflict in Ukraine is evidently shifting Russian forces from the volatile region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. For years, the best combat-ready Russian forces... MORE

Mariupol illustrates the failure of Russia’s Novorossiya’s project to attract popular support in southeastern Ukraine. That project might have been expected to meet with success in many large cities, including Mariupol. This city of 500,000 (second-largest in the Donetsk province) is thoroughly Russified linguistically, closely... MORE

Russia opened its second front against Ukraine in late August on the Azov Sea coast, threatening to capture the port city of Mariupol (Donetsk region’s outlet to the sea), and potentially to link up with Crimea. The opening of this second front, coordinated with Russia’s... MORE