Poll Shows Fewer Russians See Ukraine, U.S. As Enemies
Fewer Russians consider Ukraine and the United States to be enemy states as they shift their attention toward growing domestic problems, according to a new poll.
The number of Russians who consider the United States a hostile country dropped to 67 percent from 78 percent a year ago, a May survey conducted by the independent Levada Center showed on June 14.
Those who consider Ukraine a hostile country dropped from 49 percent to 40 percent.
Russia's relations with Ukraine and the United States deteriorated after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and then began supporting separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.
The United States later imposed sanctions on Russia to punish it for its actions.
Those sanctions -- along with a drop in oil prices -- have hurt Russia’s economic growth over the past five years as private investment stalls.
Several protests have taken place in Russia in recent months over bread-and-butter issues like wages and pensions.
Russians’ negative attitude toward the United States and Ukraine dropped because citizens are less interested in geopolitics and more concerned about prices and wages, political analyst Aleksei Makarkin told Vedomosti.
Some Russians may also be hopeful that a new leader in Ukraine will lead to better relations between the two nations, Levada Center Director Lev Gudkov told the paper.
Ukraine in April elected actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy to a five-year term as president.
Based on reporting by Vedomosti
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for June 13, 2019. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage. Thanks for reading and take care.
Saakashvili, Party Colleagues To Run In Ukraine’s Parliamentary Elections
By RFE/RL
The party of Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president who served as governor of Ukraine's Odesa region in 2015-16, has presented its list of top 10 candidates for Ukraine’s July 21 parliamentary elections.
Saakashvili tops the list of his Movement of New Forces party, which he announced in a June 13 news conference in Kyiv.
He said the list has brought together people with experience in fighting "injustice and corruption."
The former Georgian leader returned to Ukraine on May 29, a day after his Ukrainian citizenship was reinstated by new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Saakashvili was president of Georgia from January 2004 until 2013, a year after his party was dislodged by an opposition force in parliamentary elections.
In a May 28 interview with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, Saakashvili hinted that he wants to play a substantial role in public life, without specifying what it might be.
Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship and appointed to the Odesa governor's post in 2015 by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, an acquaintance from his student days in Soviet-era Kyiv. Authorities in Tbilisi stripped Saakashvili of his Georgian citizenship in December 2015 on grounds that Georgia does not allow dual citizenship.
Then, when relations with Saakashvili soured over reform efforts and the fight against corruption, Poroshenko sacked him from the Odesa governor's post in November 2016.
In July 2017, after Saakashvili created his party, Poroshenko issued a decree that stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship.
With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, Interfax, Pravda.com.ua, and the Kyiv Post
More Than 500 Torture Cases Documented By UN In Ukraine Conflict
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has documented more than 500 cases of ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, and torture by both Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists since the conflict erupted in April 2014, the mission’s head said in Kyiv on June 13.
“We believe, however, that this is the tip of the iceberg, as torture is a systemic issue in Ukraine that was exacerbated by the armed conflict,” Fiona Frazer told reporters at a press conference where she presented a new UN report.
In many instances, Frazer said, “the alleged perpetrators are the state security services and the so-called ‘ministries of state security’ of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic.”
In one case documented in the UN report, a foreign national said he had been detained and tortured by officers of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) in December. In March, after the man filed a complaint and Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) launched a probe into the incident, the same SBU officers came to his apartment.
“They asked him to come with them to Odesa, allegedly to sign some documents. In their car, the men put on masks, and seized his passport, wallet and phone,” the UN report said. “The individuals told him that he had to leave Ukraine. One of them showed the victim a live video stream of two armed men near his apartment where his wife and two children were, and told him they would enter his home if he did not agree to leave,” it continued.
The SBU officers forced the man to make a statement on video saying he was leaving Ukraine voluntarily and that he had not been abused physically or psychologically, according to the report.
At a border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova, one of the officers delivered a warning: “If you return to Ukraine, we will kill you. If you talk about what happened to you, remember that you have a family in Ukraine.”
Frazer lamented the lack of progress in previously documented cases of torture at the hands of the SBU and stressed the urgent need to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“We see no progress in the investigation of arbitrary and incommunicado detention that took place on the premises of the Kharkiv SBU from 2014 to 2016,” Frazer said. “But the Kharkiv SBU is only one of dozens of illegal places of detention, which flourished on both sides of the contact line during the early years of the conflict.
“Another location, for example, is the Izoliatsiya detention facility in Donetsk,” she said.
In Donetsk, the UN documented four cases this year of civilians detained by the security forces of Russia-backed separatists.
In one, which occurred on February 26, a mother learned that her two sons had been transferred to a detention facility and charged with “espionage” following their disappearance in 2018.
In another, on March 3, a man got into an argument with Donetsk security personnel when crossing a checkpoint and was beaten.
“He fainted, and when he regained consciousness, he realized he had been handcuffed and thrown on the floor,” the UN report said. “He was then taken outside and left handcuffed to a fence for an hour. They then threatened to kill him. He was released after signing documents which he was not allowed to read.”
Frazer said the UN mission is aware of at least 51 detention facilities on both sides of the front line where hundreds of people were subjected to arbitrary detention, torture, and ill-treatment.
Updating the civilian death toll, Frazer said 3,332 civilians have been killed while more than 7,000 were injured as a result of five years of fighting. Around 13,000 people in all have died, according to the organization’s count.
Frazer said there were 12 civilian deaths and 58 injuries recorded between January 1 and June 9.
“These are the lowest figures for the entire conflict period,” Frazer said.
Her report said the numbers “demonstrate that it is possible to progressively decrease civilian casualties to close to zero.”
In recent weeks, however, there has been a sharp uptick in artillery shelling and gunfire, resulting in at least six Ukrainian servicemen being killed last week alone.
The spike comes amid calls from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to reboot stalled peace negotiations, including the so-called Minsk Trilateral Contact Group meetings and the Normandy Format talks.
Zelenskiy will fly to France and Germany on June 17-18, respectively, where he is expected to meet with the country’s leaders to discuss the conflict, among other issues.