January 25, 2019

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Tymoshenko launches bid for presidency

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has officially announced she will run for president, with polls showing her as the front-runner in the March presidential election. “A great country is my goal, from which I will not back down a single step. That is why I am running for president today,” she told a congress of her opposition Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party in Kyiv on January 22. Mr. Tymoshenko, 58, was a leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution together with then-presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Following Mr. Yushchenko’s victory, she was appointed prime minister but was dismissed less than nine months later amid disputes with the president. She served as prime minister again in 2007-2010 and first ran for president in 2010, but lost to Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych. In 2011, during Mr. Yanukovych’s presidency, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for corruption and was released in 2014 when pro-Europe, anti-corruption protests led to Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster. That same year she ran for a second time for president, but was defeated by Petro Poroshenko, who is expected to seek a new term in the March 31 election but has not announced his candidacy. According to the latest polls, Ms. Tymoshenko now appears the favorite to win the presidential vote set for March 31, ahead of incumbent Mr. Poroshenko and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. She has presented herself as a pro-NATO, pro-European Union candidate, and has declared her backing for the Ukrainian military, which has been fighting Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014. Prominent figures who have endorsed Ms. Tymoshenko include Ukrainian Orthodox hierarch Filaret and former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who later served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa region but is now a prominent critic of Mr. Poroshenko and lives abroad. (RFE/RL, with reporting by Christopher Miller in Kyiv, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, Reuters, AFP and AP)

Zelensky admits Russian assets

Ukrainian actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who has said he is running for president of Ukraine, has admitted that he has commercial interests in Russia and has said he will divest himself of them “in the near future.” In an interview with Ukrayinska Pravda on January 20, Mr. Zelensky confirmed a January 18 report by RFE/RL that he is a co-owner of a Cyprus-registered firm called Green Family LTD, which owns the Russian filmmaking company Grin Films. “Our company owns shares of that company,” Mr. Zelensky said. “That is true.” He said that he has no direct relationship with Grin Films and had no role in the company’s successful application for a grant from the Russian Culture Ministry. He added that he has not worked in Russia since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, although he acknowledged that his company had been receiving royalties from film projects since that time. Incumbent President Petro Poroshenko has been harshly criticized by the Ukrainian opposition for allegedly owning businesses in Russia. In September 2018, he claimed that a shipyard he used to own in Russia-annexed Crimea had been seized by Russian authorities and he does not own it anymore. Mr. Poroshenko also said that he had shut down his chocolate factory in the Russian city of Lipetsk in 2014 after he became president. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)

U.S. warship heads to Black Sea

The U.S. Navy said the USS Donald Cook is heading to the Black Sea to conduct maritime security operations and enhance maritime stability with NATO allies in the region. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer was navigating the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey on January 19 as it headed north toward the Black Sea, the U.S. Navy said in a statement. “The U.S. Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea consistent with the Montreux Convention and international law,” the statement said. It did not say when it expected the ship to reach the Black Sea, but the TASS news agency quoted the Russian Defense Ministry’s Defense Control Center as saying it is “tracking the movements” of the Donald Cook, which according to international convention may stay in the Black Sea for no longer than 21 days. Tensions in the region have been heightened since November 25, 2018, when Russian security forces fired on, boarded and then seized three Ukrainian vessels near the Kerch Strait, which links the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Moscow claims the Ukrainian vessels illegally entered Russian territorial waters near Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia occupied and took over in 2014. It is holding 24 Ukrainian sailors for possible trial on charges of illegal border crossing. The United States, European Union, and other Western countries have called for their release. “The United States and the U.S. Navy continue to stand alongside our allies in defense of shared regional interests and maritime stability,” Commander Matthew J. Powel, commanding officer of Donald Cook, said in the Navy statement. “Our arrival into the Black Sea will showcase the Navy’s interoperability in pursuit of common security objectives, enabling us to respond effectively to future crises or deterring aggression,” he added. Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the Information Policy Committee of the Russian Federation Council, tweeted that “U.S. warships are becoming frequent visitors to the Black Sea.” He also wrote, “These visits have nothing to do with U.S. security,” adding: “They should keep away from our coastline.” (RFE/RL)

U.S. charges two in hack of SEC 

U.S. authorities have charged two Ukrainians in an audacious, multi-year scheme to hack into the database of the U.S. securities regulator and use unreleased corporate news releases to make illegal stock trades. Artem Radchenko, 27, and Oleksandr Ieremenko, 26, were charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and other charges in a 16-count indictment unsealed on January 15. Both men were reported to be in Kyiv. The scheme was first revealed in 2017 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates U.S. stock markets. According to the U.S. criminal complaint, the scheme, which netted $100 million in illegal profits, involved hacking into a database run by the SEC between February 2016 and March 2017. The hackers gained access to thousands of corporate news releases before they were published and then used the stolen information to make money through illegal insider trades on top company stocks. Authorities said the group gave the hackers “shopping lists” of releases they wanted to see in advance, including ones with financial results, and then traded the stocks. The hackers were routinely paid a cut of the profits. Another Ukrainian was sentenced in 2017 to 30 months in a U.S. prison as part of the scheme. (RFE/RL)

Facebook removes fake pages, accounts

Facebook has removed hundreds of pages, groups and accounts on its Facebook and Instagram platforms that the U.S. company says were part of two online disinformation operations targeting users across the former Soviet space. “The two operations we found originated in Russia, and one was active in a variety of countries while the other was specific to Ukraine,” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in in a blog post on January 17. No links between these operations were found, Mr. Gleicher said, but they used “similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing.” Mr. Gleicher said one network of 364 pages and accounts was “linked” to employees of Sputnik, a Russian state-run news site. Sputnik’s Armenia branch said on Facebook that its Russian-language page had been blocked and that as a result “our news in the Russian language will temporarily be published on the Armenian page.” In a statement on Facebook, Sputnik told its readers, “Given the possibility that the Armenian page might be blocked too, we ask you to follow our news” on Telegram, VKontakte, Twitter and other platforms. In a separate statement quoted by Russia’s state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, Sputnik said Facebook’s decision was “clearly political” and amounted to “censorship.” The people running the accounts presented themselves as independent news sources, posted on issues such as anti-NATO sentiment and protest movements, and targeted users in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries, according to Mr. Gleicher. The operation appears to have been an attempt to sow discord in the targeted countries while boosting Sputnik’s audience. The U.S. social-networking company also removed 107 Facebook pages, groups, and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” as part of the network operated in Ukraine. The individuals behind these accounts primarily represented themselves as Ukrainian, Mr. Gleicher said, and they operated a variety of fake accounts while sharing typically negative local Ukrainian news stories on a variety of topics such as protests, NATO and health conditions in schools. “We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency (IRA) activity,” Mr. Gleicher wrote. The St. Petersburg-based IRA company, commonly known as the Russian “troll farm,” is reportedly financed by Kremlin-connected businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. He and 12 other people were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February on charges including bank fraud, conspiracy, and identity theft. (Christopher Miller of RFE/RL)

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