This is a useful timeline of the Ukraine crisis:
Anna Nemtsova has been writing for The Daily Beast on where Russia is hiding the bodies of its soldiers who are dying in Ukraine. Here's an excerpt:
Hundreds of soldiers are dying on both sides in the war that started in April last year and never seems close to ending. Kiev reported around 1,800 military were killed in Donbas; the Russian non-governmental organization Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers believed that at least half of the rebel losses, 900 militants, were Russian professional military. And there is a dramatic difference between how Russian and Ukrainian families treated their lost sons in the conflict.
If Ukraine buries its military as heroes with crowds saying goodbye to each dead soldier, and the media covering the funerals, Russia stays quiet about its sons dying in Ukraine.
“It’s as if my people had been swapped with some strangers,” the head of Soldiers’ Mother’s Valentina Melnikova told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I am amazed to see how scared military families are to protest against their sons being sent to Ukraine. Parents of killed soldiers, 40- and 50-year old people, are scared to death to protest. Of what? If it’s to lose their jobs, this is ridiculous, they have lost their children.”
Last May President Putin officially declared military deaths in peacetime a state secret. His decision was seen as an attempt to cover up the Kremlin’s role in the Ukraine war. Russian human rights groups protested Putin’s decree.Russia stayed quiet about its sons dying in Ukraine.
Last week, the Supreme Court upheld Putin’s decree, ruling against the complaint by a Russian civil society group claiming that the decree was illegal, that it was hiding the true information about Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
That did not surprise Soldiers’ Mothers. They had seen the same story since the year they founded their organization 1989.
“Nobody was supposed to know the names of Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan or in Baku, their names appeared on the gravestones years later, sometimes a decade later,” Melnikova said.
Today the organization receives calls from unhappy wives of soldiers and officers moved together with their children to the Rostov region near the Ukraine frontier.
“The insanity we see is against Russia, against our state, our society—all these military families with at least 500 little children are at the new military base, closer to the Ukrainian border. Even in 1941 families were not brought close to the front lines,” Melnikova told The Daily Beast.
Read the entire article here
Russian Prosecutors Demand 23-Year Sentence For Ukrainian Filmmaker
By RFEF/RL
Russian prosecutors have asked a court to send a Ukrainian filmmaker to prison for 23 years on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks.
Critics have dismissed the charges against Oleg Sentsov as retaliation for his pro-Ukrainian position in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Sentsov, a Crimean native, was a vocal opponent of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which followed a hastily called referendum and the deployment of Russian military forces across the peninsula.
Sentsov and a co-defendant, Oleksandr Kolchenko, went on trial on July 21 in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don near the Ukrainian border.
Sentsov has been charged with organizing a terrorist group, planning terrorist attacks, and illegally acquiring explosives.
He and Kolchenko deny any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors have asked the court to sentence Kolchenko to 12 years in jail.
Sentsov's lawyer, Vladimir Samokhin, called for acquittal, saying all the charges are groundless.
They were arrested with two other Ukrainian citizens -- Oleksiy Chyrniy and Hennadiy Afanasyev -- in May 2014.
Earlier, Chyrniy and Afanasyev were found guilty of participating in the group and sentenced to seven years in prison.