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From our Brussels correspondent:
'Now I'm A Soldier': Ukrainian Filmmaker Sentsov Registers For Military Service
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
Ukrainian filmmaker and former Kremlin political prisoner Oleh Sentsov has registered for military service.
In a Facebook post on December 10, the 43-year-old Sentsov posted a picture of a military identification card that says he is an army reservist.
“Since I’m a resident of Kyiv, I went and registered for military service. Now, I’m an army reservist,” he said. “The military registration and enlistment offices are obviously dingy-looking, but the people inside are really nice. The same with our country: The people are nice, but they are unable to build a normal state.”
Sentsov until September 7 had been serving a 20-year prison sentence on what international, Russian, and Ukrainian rights groups said were trumped-up charges of “plotting terrorist acts” against Russia in Crimea, Ukraine’s peninsula that Moscow forcibly annexed in early 2014.
He had opposed and refused to recognize Moscow’s imposed rule on the Ukrainian territory.
Sentsov was incarcerated for more than five years and spent 145 days on hunger strike in 2018, demanding that Russia release all Ukrainian political prisoners.
He received last year’s Sakharov Prize For Freedom Of Thought on November 26 from the European Parliament.
During his acceptance speech, Sentsov urged European lawmakers not to forget the Ukrainians' sacrifices in the ongoing conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
"Every time, when some of you think about stretching out a hand of friendship to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin over our heads, you should remember each of 13,000 [people] killed in Ukraine, the hundreds of our boys kept in prisons, who may be tortured as we speak, the Crimean Tatars, who may at this very moment be arrested," he said.
Ukraine Investigators Confirm Treason Probe Of Ex-President Poroshenko
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
Ukrainian investigators are looking into whether former President Petro Poroshenko committed treason when the so-called Minsk agreement in 2015, a 13-point road map for resolving the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, was signed.
State Bureau of Investigations (DBR) spokeswoman Anzhelika Ivanova on December 10 confirmed to RFE/RL that a criminal case is open “on the possible commitment of high treason by Poroshenko.”
The agreement is the product of an all-night negotiating session in the Belarusian capital between the leaders of Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine in February 2015.
It was supposed to revive an earlier eponymous cease-fire agreement that was brokered in 2014 after Russian reinforcements late that summer invaded eastern Ukraine in support of Moscow-backed separatists and pushed back Kyiv forces who were on the offensive and on the verge of successfully retaking lost territories.
Suddenly, the combined Russian-separatist forces appeared poised to swallow up more territory, so a hurried truce was brokered between Ukraine, Russia, and the separatists.
The second Minsk agreement calls for the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, a process that has been monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Additional points stipulate an “all for all” exchange of prisoners, local elections in eastern Ukraine, and amnesty for combatants.
The agreement contains indefinite language and the sequencing of steps, including when Kyiv would regain control over its borders with Russia, is convoluted.
After four-way talks in Paris on December 9 with the leaders of Ukraine, France, and Germany, Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that there was no alternative to implementing the Minsk agreement.
The DBR has at least 13 other criminal cases open in which Poroshenko features either as a suspect, witness, or person of interest.
Currently a member of parliament, post-Soviet Ukraine’s fifth president has called the cases “a vivid confirmation of the revanchism that is trying to spread in Ukraine today like a cancerous tumor.”
We are now closing the live blog for today, but we'll be back again tomorrow morning to follow all the latest developments. Until then, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.