Another Ukraine-related update from RFE/RL's news desk:
A Ukrainian official says Polish economist and former politician Leszek Balcerowicz will advise Ukraine on economic reforms but will not accept a government position.
Dmytro Shymkiv, the deputy head of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's administration, said on February 2 that Balcerowicz is prepared to "give advice, consider certain ideas, and draft plans and make comments" regarding economic issues.
But Shymkiv said Balcerowicz refused to accept an official position in the Ukrainian government.
Balcerowicz, 68, is considered the architect of economic reforms in 1990 in Poland, where he was chairman of the central bank, deputy prime minister, and finance minister.
His reform of Poland's socialist economy was known as the Balcerowicz Plan and "shock therapy."
The changes aimed to end hyperinflation and balance the budget but were criticized by many for being too harsh and leading to high unemployment.
(Interfax, Kyiv Post)
Here is the latest map of the military situation in the Donbas region -- issued by Ukraine's National Security And Defense Council (click to enlarge):
Our resident Kremlin watcher Brian Whitmore's new Daily Vertical video is out. Today, he's looking at just how much is at stake in Ukraine:
Today's Financial Times takes a fascinating, in-depth look at how tortuous diplomatic dealings between the West and Russia have become:
After more than 40 telephone calls and countless hours of meetings over the past six months, Angela Merkel braced herself for one last push. It was past 10pm and the German chancellor was sitting in a Hilton hotel conference room in Brisbane, Australia. Her interlocutor was the implacable Vladimir Putin.
For nearly two hours, the Russian president reeled off a litany of resentments. The west had proclaimed victory in the cold war. It had cheated Moscow by expanding the EU and Nato right to Russia’s borders. It had ignored international rules to pursue reckless policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
The chancellor steered the conversation back to eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists were engaged in a bloody struggle against the western-backed government in Kiev, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Since the crisis began, Ms Merkel had worked hard to extract some sense from Mr Putin of what he wanted — something she could use to construct an agreement. When he finally offered a solution, she was shocked. Mr Putin declared Kiev should deal with the rebels the way he had dealt with Russia’s breakaway Chechnya region: by buying them off with autonomy and money. A reasonable idea, perhaps, to an ex-KGB colonel. But for an East German pastor’s daughter, with a deeply-ingrained sense of fairness, this was unacceptable.
Vladimir Putin is the master destabiliser. A black belt in judo, he is an expert at keeping opponents off-balance. He alternates between the friendly gesture and the menacing glance. Throughout the crisis in Ukraine, the most serious threat to security in Europe since the end of the cold war, Mr Putin has succeeded in wrongfooting western leaders. They know he wants to restore Russia’s influence and keep Ukraine within his orbit, but are at a loss to divine how he intends to achieve his aims.
Ms Merkel had asked her closest advisers to stay outside during the Brisbane meeting, on November 15 last year. “She wanted to be alone . . . to test whether she could get Putin to be more open about what he really wants,” says someone briefed on the conversation. “But he wouldn’t say what his strategy is, because he doesn’t know.”
When the hotel meeting broke up at about 2am, Chancellor Merkel and President Putin were in dark moods. Hours later, the Russian leader would fly home, missing the second day of the G20 summit and fuming about snubs from other world leaders. Ms Merkel, according to two people briefed on the outcome, left convinced there would be no quick end to the crisis.
She fretted, too, that Mr Putin’s ambitions to reassert Russian influence stretched beyond Ukraine. The next day in Sydney, she cast aside her usual caution. “Who would have thought it possible that 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . something like this could happen in the middle of Europe?” she said in a speech. Mr Putin’s escapades in Ukraine called “the whole of the European peaceful order into question”. She also added a new warning — that Russia might come to threaten not just Ukraine, but Georgia or the Balkans.
For Moscow, too, something snapped. Weeks later, a Kremlin official dismissed the notion, often cited in diplomatic circles, that there had ever been a “special relationship” between the two leaders. “Putin and Merkel could never stand each other,” he told the Financial Times. “Of course, they are professionals, so they tried to make the best of it for a long time. But that seems to have changed now.”
Read the entire article here