President Vladimir Putin announced today (March 4) that Russia’s ground troops, deployed across Crimea since March 1, have “reinforced the protection of our installations” (“obiekty”) on that territory of Ukraine. The Russian president’s remarks neither acknowledge nor dispute Ukraine’s sovereignty in Crimea. However, Putin depicted... MORE

The two telephone conversations between United States President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 2 and February 22 marked a dramatic deterioration of relations caused by the near-complete collapse of common ground in managing the crisis in Ukraine. The first discussion about... MORE

As of at least Friday, February 28, unmarked Russian tanks are reportedly moving through the streets of Simferopol, the administrative capital of Crimea (https://guzei.com/online_tv/watch.php?online_tv_id=4919). The crisis situation on this Ukrainian peninsula, populated by majority ethnic Russians, has been escalating for the past several days. On... MORE

In the pre-dawn hours on February 27 in Simferopol, some 50 heavily armed Russian men in camouflage uniforms without identification marks seized the parliament and government buildings of the Crimean Autonomous Republic, which forms a part of Ukraine. That squad is presumed to be Russian... MORE

A flurry of publications and public statements comparing and contrasting Belarus and Ukraine (see EDM, February 18) continues. On February 23, Belarus celebrated the Day of the Homeland’s Defender, a national holiday inherited from the Soviet Union. In his holiday speech, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka stated... MORE

An unexpected breakthrough emerged in the stalled investigations of several mysterious international murders of Chechens with ties to the Caucasus Emirate in 2008–2012. The news concerns a person who simultaneously worked for the security services of several countries—Russia, Georgia and Turkey.  A kind of James... MORE

The sudden meltdown of President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime in Kyiv last week has surprised the Kremlin. On Wednesday February 19, during the height of the bloodbath in Kyiv, when dozens of people were shot dead and hundreds wounded, the Kremlin-financed news website Vzglad was calling... MORE

On February 25, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (national parliament) chairman and acting head of state, Oleksandr Turchynov, appointed Oleh Makhnitsky as acting general prosecutor, with instructions to “rebuff separatist tendencies” in parts of south-eastern Ukraine and Crimea. According to Turchynov as he introduced the appointment, separatists... MORE

Ukraine has embarked on regime transition. The interim leadership now confronts an entirely new mix of challenges to national and civil security, of greater complexity and intensity than anything in the country’s experience since 1991. Thousands of participants in the recent protest movement are still... MORE

Turning Ukraine into a federation of regional units is an idea that Moscow airs almost predictably, when facing a net loss of Russian influence over Ukraine. “Federalizing” Ukraine traditionally connotes, from Moscow’s perspective, undermining the authority of the central government in Kyiv in relation to... MORE