Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin arrived in Kiev yesterday on a mission assigned to him by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He tried to reach an agreement with the Ukrainians on the joint observation of the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava in the summer of 2009. However, under an order by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko issued last year, Ukraine will not observe the Russian victory...

Kyiv will sign deals with U.S. firms on March 30 on supplies of nuclear fuel, and on equipment deliveries paving the way for Ukraine's own enrichment capability, the energy minister said on Wednesday. Ukraine, which relies almost entirely on Russia for its nuclear fuel imports, has stepped up efforts in recent years to diversify supplies amid rising prices and energy disputes with Russia...

In on-the-record interventions and, especially, at off-the-record policy conferences, German officials lay out a whole collection of arguments against Membership Action Plans (MAPs) for Georgia and Ukraine at the upcoming NATO summit. Several West European governments share some of those arguments to some degree or another...

Representatives of the Russian government and the Kremlin are multiplying their threats to Ukraine (as well as to Georgia) ahead of next week’s NATO summit, where Membership Action Plans (MAPs) for the two countries will be considered. Moscow realizes more clearly than some NATO governments that this issue is a defining one for the Alliance at its April 2-4 summit in Bucharest...

WBA light-welterweight champion Gavin Rees lost the first defence of his title on Saturday, stopped in the final round by Ukraine's Andreas Kotelnik. The Welshman was caught with a whipping right hand with less than a minute remaining of the 12th round and seconds later stumbled to the canvas...

The German government’s all-out, public campaign against Georgian and Ukrainian Membership Action Plans (MAPs) risks splitting NATO ahead of the alliance’s April 2-4 Bucharest summit. Germany alone has embarked on such a public crusade, in the avowed expectation that other NATO countries would follow Berlin’s lead. If so, such countries would in fact be deferring not so much to Germany as to Russia...

Ukraine's government has made changes to a hard-won natural gas agreement with Russia, insisting that a middleman company be removed from the trade, the prime minister said Wednesday. Yulia Tymoshenko said that, while the Cabinet has given its overall approval to the deal, it has made several changes, such as eliminating trader RosUkrEnergo from the gas dealings beginning next month. The agreement struck last week appeared to indicate that the company, half-owned by Russia's natural gas giant OAO Gazprom, remains through the year's end...

“Significant formations of OUN [the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization] were created in the Donetsk Oblast: in Mariupol, OUN numbered up to 300 people…” “In the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, in the second quarter of 1944, 711 nationalist were arrested, in the third quarter – 744…” SBU keeps on declassifying KGB archives about the nationalist movements in Ukraine. A regular public hearing, devoted to the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the south and east of Ukraine took place in Kyiv on March 13...

The U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission) on March 4 held a hearing on NATO enlargement and the alliance’s upcoming Bucharest summit. The hearing examined issues faced by NATO as Albania, Croatia and Macedonia hope for invitations to join the alliance, while Ukraine and Georgia expect to be offered Membership Action Plans. Testifying before the Helsinki Commission were: Dr. Michael Haltzel, senior fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies...

General Roman Shukhevych and the 300 men who formed the Nachtigal battalion made their choices at a very difficult time which I did not live through and am not entitled to judge. This approach would not be appropriate if atrocities and crimes against humanity were involved. Since these are the charges frequently bandied about, the need to check their source and validity is paramount...