It seemed like a joke at first. Russia's chief firefighter, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, declared that it should be a crime to deny the role played by the Soviet Union in securing victory in World War II. Surely he didn't mean to be taken seriously. But the next day when Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika endorsed Shoigu's suggestion, it no longer seemed funny. Apparently the complete pointlessness -- from the legal point of view -- of such a moronic suggestion wasn't enough to dissuade our legally competent prosecutor-general. The proposal must seem serious enough to him. I imagine that these high-ranking officials are scared to death by the rumors...

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall and the repressive Communist regimes of Eastern Europe came crashing down to usher in a new era of political and economic freedom. Today, it is Eastern Europe's banks and economies that are threatening to crash. The Polish zloty is down 38% against the dollar in the last six months alone. Hungary's forint is down 32%. Ukraine posted a staggering 34% drop in January industrial output from a year earlier. While the entire world is reeling, right now the eye of the global financial storm has moved to Central and Eastern Europe. If Western nations do not act quickly to address the snowballing financial crisis that is brewing from Latvia to Hungary, we risk replacing an era of promise and progress in Eastern Europe with one of soaring unemployment, instability and a weakening of the influence and ideals we have spent decades building...

Pessimists believe that Ukraine is on the verge of default. Fortunately, such a calamity is unlikely, but Ukraine badly needs more international financial support to handle a tremendous external shock. A year ago, Ukraine’s economy was in sound health after eight years of an average annual economic growth of 7.6 percent. Ukraine has maintained a minimal budget deficit, and its public debt was as small as 12 percent of GDP in 2007. Ukraine’s mistake, however, was to keep its exchange rate pegged to the US dollar, which encouraged speculative short-term capital inflows, driving up inflation to 31 percent last May and the current account deficit to 6.7 percent of GDP last year...

Ukraine's parliament has dismissed Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko over his handling of policy, including a territorial dispute with Romania and Russia. A total of 250 members in the 450-seat assembly voted to sack Ohryzko, one of two ministers appointed by President Viktor Yushchenko. The number is considerably more than the 226 needed for the measure to pass. It was the second departure of a minister from the government team this year, after Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk resigned last month, citing differences with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko...

The different approaches of Ukrainian and Russian scholars to the interpretation of the 1932–33 famine in the USSR first manifested themselves fifteen years ago. Practically from the very beginning this essentially scholarly issue turned into a political one. In 2008, the Year to Remember the Victims of the Holodomor, the dispute between politicians and scholars in both countries over this tragic page in our common history had become a quarrel, and the Ukrainian citizens of the Russian Federation were not allowed to carry out the memorial project “Inextinguishable Candle.” Can both sides reach an understanding?

Two Ukrainian early-warning radar systems ceased data sharing with Russia overnight after a post-Soviet agreement between the two countries was cancelled, Ukraine's Space Agency said on Thursday. Quoting Moscow defence ministry officials, Russian media said Moscow had put into service its own facility in Armavir in the southern Krasnodar region to protect its southern flank, after the loss of data from the Ukrainian-based radars. Russia cancelled a 1992 agreement on sharing radar information last year, saying the systems were outdated and that it would be "unthinkable" to have such installations in a country aspiring to join NATO...

In order to counter Kyiv's insistence that Stalin carried out a genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s, an insistence that is at the core of the definition of the Ukrainian nation, Moscow has released new documents suggesting that the Soviet dictator engaged in a criminal campaign of mass murder across the entire Soviet Union. Yesterday, Vladimir Kozlov, the head of Russia's Federal Archives Agency, told a Moscow press conference that the famine in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR was "the result of [Stalin's] criminal policy" but that "of course, no one planned any famine" or singled out any ethnic group as its victim...

Russia issued a DVD and a thick book of historical documents on Wednesday to dispute claims that the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s amounted to genocide. Russian archivists and historians pressed the Kremlin's case that the Stalin-era famine — which killed millions of people — was a common tragedy across Soviet farmlands, countering efforts by Ukraine's pro-Western president to convince the world that Ukrainians were targeted for starvation. "Not a single document exists that even indirectly shows that the strategy...

Russia will steadily decline military-technical cooperation with Ukraine, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said in an interview published by the Thursday issue of the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. "We still depend on each other, as cooperation between Russian and Ukrainian defense sectors took shape in the Soviet period. A number of measures aimed to stop industrial and military-technical cooperation with Ukraine had been taken before the Georgian aggression," he said in reply to the question how sanctions against countries, which had been supplying Georgia with armaments, could tell on Russia-Ukraine military-technical cooperation...