There is frustration among Western leaders with Kiev's failure to make peace efforts and implement the Minsk agreements, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin told the UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Friday. The Security Council gathered on Friday to call for the full implementation of the agreements reached in Minsk on February 12 amid escalating tensions between the conflictin [...]

The timing of the new tensions in Donbass, provoked by the Kiev forces, is connected with the upcoming EU summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He added that Kiev has breached the Minsk deal and Moscow is waiting for the OSCE's reaction. "The violations are obvious and [Foreign] Minister [Sergey] Lavrov has already said that the representatives of the OSCE are to draw corresponding conc [...]

The US and its Western allies are well aware of all the ceasefire violations in eastern Ukraine but, deliberately turn a blind eye to Kiev's actions, hackers said after obtaining the emails of top Ukrainian official overseeing the truce. The anti-Kiev hacktivist group, CyberBerkut, claims to have hacked the emails of Major-General Andrey Taran, Chief of the Joint Centre for Ceasefire Control an [...]

Kiev will nationalize Russian overseas property as compensation for the losses over Crimea's reunification with Russia, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Justice Natalia Sevostyanova said. The decision is now up to the European Court of Human Rights. Ukraine will be able to use this effective instrument if the European Court of Human Rights rules in favor of Kiev, Sevostyanova told “Channel 5,” [...]

Russia will appeal to the International Court of Justice if Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signs a moratorium on the payment of Ukraine's external debt into law and fails to pay its debt to Russia, said Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. Siluanov said Ukraine was virtually defaulting on its debt, adding that Russia doesn’t yet have grounds to lodge any claims. [...]

Victoria Nuland arrived in Moscow last weekend and declared that Ukraine's government doesn't intend to resume the civil war. Either Nuland was being mendacious or President Poroshenko is on a dangerous solo-run. It’s all gone Lethal Weapon. Not in the sense of munitions, although some of those are definitely in play, but rather the movie series. [...]

The US has bought the Kiev government, trained its troops and has been sending equipment to Ukraine, said Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute.It would be naïve to assume that the US has backed off on the situation. At least one civilian has been killed in the shelling of Donetsk which is an apparent violation of the ceasefire reached under the Minsk agreement. [...]

At least one civilian has been killed in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk after an army shell hit an apartment building amid intense fire on rebel positions. An RT correspondent says the city has seen one of its worst shellings in months. “There was fire, shelling for about two hours and it was almost non-stop…blast after blast, you could feel the vibrations from the explosions, kilome [...]

Ukraine's government has submitted to parliament a bill allowing the introduction of a moratorium on foreign debt payments. This is to protect state assets in case of an "attack" from dishonest lenders, and to help the ailing economy out of crisis. "To protect the interests of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian government today has introduced to the Rada a bill that would give the government t [...]

One year into the Ukrainian crisis, Washington reveals a desire to jump on the bandwagon of the Minsk peace accords - brokered by France and Germany. Not bad news, after all, but when it comes from Victoria Nuland... News that US Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Sochi to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin came as only a small surprise this week. [...]

Ukrainian nationalists accused of having links to Nazi Germany have been legalized, praised as freedom fighters and granted social benefits in legislation signed by president Poroshenko as part of so-called "de-communisation" package of laws. Such paramilitary groups as Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), as well as other underground groups that [...]

You really couldn't make it up, could you? Serial warmonger and unsuccessful US Presidential candidate Senator John McCain has been offered a post as an adviser to Ukraine's "Chocolate King" President Petro Poroshenko. He was supposed to join other neocon rejects such as Georgia’s fugitive ex-President (and famous tie-eater) Mikhail Saakashvili and the ex-Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. [...]

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says there has been a serious breakthrough in fulfilling the Minsk peace roadmap in Ukraine. Despite any difficulties encountered, he says, the participants must press on with implementing the deal. Steinmeier was speaking at a meeting of NATO member states diplomats in Antalya, Turkey. [...]

John Kerry's Sochi meetings with Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov hardly dissolved years of mistrust between Washington and the Kremlin. However, they probably signaled the end of Ukraine’s period as a global cause célèbre. In 1968, at an art exhibition in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the celebrated artist Andy Warhol was the star attraction. [...]

The Ukrainian Parliament has approved new regulations on martial law, which among other things allows for extrajudicial detention and relocation of Russian citizens in the country. The law was approved by 254 deputies out of 322. It regulates how martial law can be declared in Ukraine and the changes to legal procedures it brings. [...]

The Ukrainian president's decision to reclaim Donetsk Airport, a key strategic point in the conflict in the country's east, are in violation of the Minsk peace deal, says the Kremlin. Petro Poroshenko vowed on Monday to take the airport back: "I have no doubt - we will free the airport, because it is our land. [...]

Ukraine as a new nation has to create a useable past, Arch Getty, Professor of Russian and Soviet history at UCLA told RT's In the Now show. War criminals like Bandera, who killed a lot of civilians, are being praised by Kiev government now, he added. Mikhail Gorbachev said that snubbing the Victory parade is disrespect for the people who suffered enormous losses fighting Nazism. [...]

The question many people ask: How come hundreds of West Europeans came to fight for the self-proclaimed republics in Eastern Ukraine? In fact, the defense of Donbass became the first major volunteer war in Europe since the Spanish Civil War. Then the internationalist brigades (briogadistas) composed of the British, French and Polish leftists, coupled with military professionals from the Soviet [...]

Thousands of people in Ukraine, Russia and around the world took to the streets to mark the first anniversary of the Odessa massacre. Last year, 48 activists were killed and over 200 injured as radicals set the local trade unions house on fire. The commemoration ceremonies for those who died in the fire on May 2, 2014 proceeded without serious incident in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. & [...]

Ukraine has the fastest falling economy of 2015 according to the British periodical The Economist. The country has seen its GDP shrink by 6.5 percent since last April, with countries like Libya and Macau performing better. The Ukrainian economy showed the most significant deepening recession compared to the rest of the world, according to the data, published on Wednesday by the head of the anal [...]

Russian President Putin did not agree to a possible deployment of peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine, his spokesman said in response to Kiev's claims to the contrary. Moscow insists that all points of the Minsk agreement are fulfilled first. The peacekeeper initiative was discussed on Thursday in a phone conversation between the so-called Normandy Four - the leaders of France, Germany Russia and U [...]

Citing an anti-Russia policy brief, US lawmakers approved $200 million for providing "lethal weapons of a defensive nature" to the Ukrainian government as part of the $600 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the fiscal year 2016. The House Armed Services Committee passed its proposal for the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a bipartisan vote of 60 to 2, in what Defense News [...]