December 2, 2016

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Poroshenko: Holodomor was genocide

KYIV – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called for the Holodomor, the Ukraine famine of the 1930s, to be recognized as “genocide.” Mr. Poroshenko spoke at a ceremony in Kyiv on November 26 marking the official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor, which commemorates the millions who died of famine under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “I just signed a presidential decree that among other things tasks the Foreign Ministry to continue its work to achieve a recognition of Holodomor among the international community, foreign countries and international organizations as the genocide of the Ukrainian people,” he said. President Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, representatives from Ukraine’s churches, and envoys from various countries attended a ceremony to honor the victims. There was also a nationwide minute’s silence observed at 4 p.m. local time. The official Day of Remembrance for the victims of the famine is marked every year on the fourth Saturday of November. (RFR/RL)

Russian forces in Crimea on high alert 

MOSCOW – Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reports that Russian air-defense forces in Crimea have been placed on high alert on the eve of planned Ukrainian missile tests near the Black Sea peninsula. Moscow has protested the tests planned for December 1-2 near Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in March 2014. Russia’s Foreign Affaitrs Ministry on November 30 called the planned missile tests a “new large-scale provocation,” saying they were aimed at “escalating the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.” On November 29, Ukraine issued an additional formal notice to airmen (NOTAM) in airspace danger zones in connection with the tests of air-to-air combat missile systems. It said the tests will be conducted in accordance with international regulations entirely in Ukraine’s airspace over the open sea. Media reports in Ukraine quoted Defense Ministry sources as saying that Moscow had officially warned Kyiv it would respond to the missile tests with a missile attack. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on November 30 that he had never heard about such warnings. Russia illegally annexed Crimea in March 2014 and an ensuing war between Kyiv’s forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed at least 9,600 people in eastern Ukraine. (RFE/RL, based on reporting by UNIAN, Interfax and TASS)

Separatists ban Czech aid group 

PRAGUE – A Czech-based humanitarian organization, People In Need, says it has been banned from operating in the Donetsk area of eastern Ukraine by Russia-backed separatists there. In a November 26 statement, the non-governmental aid group said it was one of two international organizations that has been helping residents with home repairs, and with supplies of water and food, ahead of the coming winter. The statement said “local authorities have taken immediate actions” to close the Donetsk region office of People In Need and have sealed off the warehouse where the group stores humanitarian aid there. It said the separatists have also ordered all international aid workers to leave areas under their control within 24 hours. The aid group said the banning order had been delivered to them on November 25. It said a reason for the decision was not given. People In Need says it has provided food to nearly 470,000 people in separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine so far in 2016. It says it has also provided material help or home repairs for more than 100,000 people. The aid group said it is continuing to operate in the Luhansk separatist area of Ukraine as well as on government-controlled territory. (RFE/RL, with reporting by Reuters)

A step closer to EU visa liberalization 

BRUSSELS – European Union member states moved a step closer to giving Ukraine visa-free access after ambassadors gave the bloc’s executive authority the green light for new talks on easing the rules. The decision on November 17 by EU ambassadors now gives the executive authority, known as the European Council, a mandate to work with the bloc’s legislative chamber, the European Parliament, on a procedural mechanism. The ability for Ukrainians to travel through Europe’s so-called Schengen zone has been long sought by Kyiv, since it would potentially give a jolt to cross-border trade. But some European nations fear an influx of lower-wage workers from Ukraine will put more pressure on labor markets and add to the growing doubts about immigration on the continents. Both Ukraine and Georgia, another former Soviet republic, are at the same stage in the process, waiting for a compromise between the European Council and the European Parliament on the suspension mechanism. (RFE/RL)

Juncker expects visa deal by year-end 

BRUSSELS – A final decision on visa liberalization for Ukraine to the European Union’s Schengen zone is likely to be made by the end of the year, according to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Speaking at the EU-Ukraine summit in Brussels on November 24, Mr. Juncker said that he was “confident” that a deal would be reached in 2016. European Council President Donald Tusk said he’s hopeful the process can be finalized in 2016. “I think, realistic and cautious optimism not an irresponsible prognosis or forecast,” Mr. Tusk said. Both the EU member states and the European Parliament have given the initial green light for a visa-free regime for Ukraine. But the two institutions have been locked in protracted negotiations over a suspension mechanism that would allow the EU to suspend visa-free travel in emergency cases. An agreement on this is necessary before a final go-ahead can be struck on visa liberalization. EU diplomats that RFE/RL spoke to on November 23 stated that it would be “difficult” to find a compromise on the suspension mechanism before the end of the year. But after the November 24 talks among EU and Ukrainian leaders in Brussels, it appears likely that there will be a final push to find a solution before the end of the year. A deal would allow Ukrainians to travel to the EU without visas for a period of up to 90 days in any 180-day period. (RFE/RL)

Poroshenko sees continued U.S. support 

BRUSSELS – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has expressed confidence in continued U.S. support for his country after having spoken to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on the phone about Russian “aggression.” Speaking on November 24 at the European Union-Ukraine summit in Brussels, Mr. Poroshenko said that “Ukraine has strong bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress and among the U.S. politicians, both Republican and Democrat.” He added, “We don’t expect any significant changes in this bipartisan support.” During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump had signaled a more conciliatory approach to the Kremlin and even suggested he might accept Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Mr. Poroshenko said that Mr. Trump had raised “the question of the Russian aggression and illegal annexation of Crimea” in a phone conversation a few days after the Republican candidate’s election victory. The Ukrainian president also said that he had “an opportunity to give Mr. Trump very detailed information about the latest situation in the east of my country and in Crimea.” (RFE/RL, with reporting by AFP)

Report on corruption cites Ukraine

BERLIN – A new report by Transparency International says that one in three people living in the region stretching from Europe to Central Asia see corruption as among the biggest problems facing their country. And more than half say their government is doing a poor job in fighting corruption in the public sector. Issued on November 16, the annual report, the Global Corruption Barometer 2016, is based on interviews with 60,000 people across 42 countries from Britain and Portugal in the west to Russia and Kazakhstan in the east. According to the survey, citizens in Moldova are the most concerned by corruption, with 67 percent of respondents rating it as one of the greatest issues facing their society. In Kosovo, Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina, smaller numbers of people – yet still more than 50 percent of the population – also regard corruption as among their countries’ most pressing problems. And less than half – but still over one-third – of the people in Romania, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Macedonia view corruption as one of their biggest challenges. In Ukraine, Albania, Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, Romania and Moldova, more than half of respondents say that their parliamentary representatives are highly corrupt. In Moldova, the number rises to 76 percent of respondents. Meanwhile, people in most countries across the region covered in the report say their governments are “very bad” or “fairly bad” at fighting corruption in government. The overwhelming majority of the citizens of Ukraine (86 percent), Moldova (84 percent), and Bosnia (83 percent) are particularly critical of their governments’ efforts at cleaning up politics. The report also found that bribery remains commonplace in many countries in the region. The highest frequency of bribe paying was in Tajikistan, where half the households surveyed reported doing so. Tajikistan was closely followed by Moldova (42 percent), Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine (all 38 percent), and Russia (34 percent). (RFE/RL)

Russia prolongs journalist’s detention 

MOSCOW – A court in Moscow has prolonged the pretrial detention of Ukrainian journalist Roman Sushchenko, who has been held in Russia on suspicion of espionage. The Lefortovo District Court on November 28 ordered the pretrial detention term of Mr. Sushchenko extended until January 30, 2017. Mr. Sushchenko, a Paris-based correspondent of the Ukrinform news agency, was detained in Moscow on September 30 on suspicion of collecting classified information. He was formally charged with espionage on October 7. The Ukrainian government has denied that Mr. Sushchenko is an agent of the intelligence services. In October, Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry handed a protest note to the Russian consul in Kyiv demanding Mr. Sushchenko’s immediate release. (RFE/RL, based on reporting by TASS and Rapsinews)

Saakashvili holds rally in Kyiv

KYIV – A diverse crowd of about 1,000 people turned out in central Kyiv for a rally in support of a new political movement headed by Mikheil Saakashvili, the reformist former Georgian president who has launched a second political career in Ukraine. Mr. Saakashvili launched the New Forces movement and called for early parliamentary elections, days after he quit his job of governor of the Odesa region on November 7 and accused President Petro Poroshenko of coddling a corrupt elite. Mr. Poroshenko had brought Mr. Saakashvili in to govern Odesa Oblast as part of an effort to conduct reforms in Ukraine, where entrenched graft and a costly conflict with Russia-backed separatists who hold part of the eastern Donbas region is hobbling progress following the pro-European protests that pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014. The rally on November 27 brought a mix of young and older people, many waving Ukrainian flags and some holding flags of the European Union – one of the symbols of the Euro-Maidan protests. Mr. Saakashvili repeated his call for early elections and promised, “We will win, we will return Ukraine’s wealth to its people and will recover its potential.” He told supporters he knows how to “make Ukraine great… and we will do it together.” Mr. Saakashvili vaulted to power in Georgia’s peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution and led the country for almost a decade, but his party was defeated by an opposition coalition in the 2012 parliamentary vote. He is now sought in Georgia on criminal charges related to his 2004-2013 presidency that he says are politically motivated. (RFE/RL, with reporting by Christopher Miller)

Russia releases Mustafa Dzhemilev’s son

KYIV – Khaiser Dzhemilev, the son of Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, was released from a penal colony in Astrakhan in southern Russia on November 25. Mr. Dzhemilev’s lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, said in a Facebook post on November 26 that Mr. Dzhemilev has arrived in Ukraine. Mr. Dzhemilev was granted early release from a three-and-a-half year sentence on manslaughter and weapons possession charges. He was initially convicted by a Ukrainian court in 2013 of accidentally shooting one of the family’s bodyguards, Fevzi Edimov. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, the Moscow-backed authorities took over the case, moved him to mainland Russia and tried him again on the same charges. Mustafa Dzhemilev, who strongly protested the annexation of Crimea and is currently living in Kyiv, said that Russia was using his son to blackmail him into stopping his campaign against the annexation. The 72-year-old Mr. Dzhemilev has been banned from Crimea since Russia invaded and annexed the peninsula in early 2014. He had been the chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, or council, until it was banned by pro-Moscow representatives in Crimea. He is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and a well-known Soviet-era human rights activist. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, with reporting by the Financial Times and TASS)

Flip-flop on Poroshenko’s Spanish villa 

KYIV – A Ukrainian corruption watchdog has changed its position on whether President Petro Poroshenko should have declared ownership of a Spanish seaside villa, raising questions about the state agency’s independence from the presidential administration. Mr. Poroshenko’s ownership of the multimillion-dollar luxury villa was discovered during an investigation conducted by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. The investigation, published on November 10, also uncovered Spanish properties owned by two of Mr. Poroshenko’s close political allies. The revelations raised eyebrows because the properties were not listed in asset declarations that officials were required to have filed by October 30 as part of a new, International Monetary Fund-backed push to promote transparency in Ukraine. While the Poroshenko administration argued that the president did not need to declare the villa because he declared ownership of the company to which the villa belonged, the government’s National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) initially said otherwise. Deputy NAPC head Ruslan Radetskyy originally told RFE/RL in the course of its investigation that, by law, a public official submitting a declaration “must specify all property that belongs to him, through a company or as an individual.” But in response to a follow-up inquiry, Mr. Radetskyy wrote in an English-language e-mail to RFE/RL on November 21 that: “As long as Petro Poroshenko and members of his family do not use the property mentioned to gain profit, and the legal entity owning this property disposes of the latter on its own, this property is not a subject for e-declaration, in accordance with the law.” Mr. Radetskyy’s latest interpretation of the e-declaration law is also open to question. Dmytro Kotlyar, an anti-corruption expert who co-authored the law, told RFE/RL that “Poroshenko should have probably declared the villa, rather than not.” (Christopher Miller and Natalie Sedletska for RFE/RL)

EuroParliament on Russia’s ‘fake news’ 

BRUSSELS – The European Parliament has warned that “hostile propaganda” by Russia against the EU is growing, while urging member states to increase their efforts to counter disinformation. The move drew an angry response from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who lashed out at the European Parliament for lecturing Russia on democracy. Lawmakers voted on November 23 in favor of a motion condemning Russian state media outlets like the television channel RT and the news agency Sputnik for disseminating “absolutely fake” news. They said the Kremlin was using “a wide range of tools and instruments”, including think tanks, multilingual TV stations, “pseudo news agencies”, and social media to spread fake information, challenge democratic values, and divide Europe. The resolution says the Kremlin has stepped up its propaganda efforts against the EU since Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea territory in 2014. Lawmakers urged the European Union to boost its “tiny” communication force and invest more in “awareness raising, education, online and local media, investigative journalism, and information literacy.” They said they were “seriously concerned by the rapid expansion of Kremlin-inspired activities in Europe, including disinformation and propaganda seeking to maintain or increase Russia’s influence to weaken and split the EU.” Mr. Putin told reporters in Moscow that the resolution signaled a “political degradation of democratic ideas in Western society.” The motion was approved by 304 votes to 179, with 208 abstentions. The EU Parliament also warned against propaganda from the extremist group Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda, and other non-state actors. (RFE/RL, based on reporting by AFP and Reuters)

EU court upholds sanctions on Rotenberg 

BRUSSELS – An EU court has partly upheld sanctions imposed on Arkady Rotenberg, a Russian businessman and close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Rotenberg was added to the EU travel ban and asset-freeze list in the summer of 2014 for his role in the Ukraine crisis. In its November 30 ruling, the EU’s General Court annulled the sanctions against Mr. Rotenberg for the period July 2014 to March 2015 because the EU legal reasoning was at fault, a statement said. However, the Luxembourg-based court said the two additional grounds cited in March 2015 justified the restrictions. The additional reasons provided included the fact that Mr. Rotenberg is the owner of the company Stroygazmontazh, which received a Russian state contract to build a bridge from Russia to Crimea. He is also the chairman of the board of directors of the publishing house Prosveschenyie, which was behind a campaign to persuade Crimean children that they are now Russian citizens living in Russia. Mr. Rotenberg has two months to appeal the ruling. (RFE/RL)

Teacher accused of attempting to sell teen

KYIV – Ukrainian authorities say they have arrested a teacher accused of trying to sell a 13-year-old girl for $10,000. Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov reported the case on Facebook on November 22, with photos of the girl and 52-year-old teacher. The girl was living at a boarding school in the eastern Kharkiv region for orphans and children from broken homes. Ukrainian media named the suspect as Galina Kovalenko, a teacher of Ukrainian and Russian languages. Mr. Avakov said the buyer hinted that the girl’s organs would be removed, paying the teacher 1,000 hrv ($39) for photos of her and her medical records. “They got this seller ‘red-handed’ when she took the girl out of the boarding school, brought her to the buyers, and received money,” the minister said. (RFE/RL, based on reporting by Interfax and the BBC)

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