Ukraine’s Independence Day on August 24 will be traditionally marked by a military parade through the center of Kyiv, says Ukraine’s Culture Ministry.
The decision, however, was criticized among social media users yesterday evening after the parade’s rehearsal. Kyiv citizens could see bright flashes and hear explosions, which were part of the rehearsal, according to local press reports. Some witnesses said the explosions were “unexpected and scary.”
“I don’t know who is rehearsing what, but I hate those people. My hands are shaking and I’m crying … I can imagine what those who were under shelling feel like,” wrote an activist Oleksandra Dvoretska on Facebook.
At the same time, a photo of a soldier with an amputated leg saluting while watching the parade rehearsal, was shared some 250 times on Facebook.
“And let another *** tell me that we don’t need a parade… Glory to the nation!” wrote the author of the post.
As Russia crawls deeper into its sanctioned-food-destruction hole, local activists join the fight.
In a video published on YouTube yesterday, two Russian Cossacks and a former member of well-known rock band Leningrad, Stat Baretsky, came to a St. Petersburg’s supermarket chain in search of sanctioned produce.
In a bizarre fit of patriotism, Baretsky destroys two cans of foreign beer by biting through them and tearing them apart. He then proceeds to offer money to supermarket employees to clean up the mess after him.
The group buys all the foreign goods they can find in the shop and asks the management for their certification.
“We are in a state of Cold War with the European Union,” says one of the Cossacks. “Why does Europe cause us troubles, and we have to feed it by buying its goods?”
The management later assured them that all the goods sold at the supermarket were legal and of proper quality.
The communist party of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic has issued a party membership card with ID number 000001 to Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik Revolution leader.
A new installment of Vladimir Putin graffiti has appeared in Simferopol, the capital of the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
The painters came to Crimea from Russia for a summer vacation. They offered to spray Putin on the walls of Simferopol and the local government agreed, according to the local press. The men needed a little over a day and about 20-30 cans of spray-paint to finish the graffiti.
Latest on Savchenko:
A Russian court has rejected a defense request to move the high-profile trial of Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko to Moscow.
The Rostov-on-Don regional court ruled on August 21 that Savchenko -- who is charged with providing information that led to the deaths of two Russian journalists -- should be tried in a small town near the Ukrainian border.
Russian officials say Savchenko, who served in a volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine where Ukrainian forces are fighting Russian-backed separatists, provided the coordinates for a mortar attack that killed the journalists last summer.
Savchenko, whose lawyers say was captured by rebels in Ukraine and smuggled into Russia, had previously gone on a hunger strike to protest her detention, which she says is illegal.
International rights groups have called for Savchenko to be released.
Savchenko's lawyer, Mark Feygin, tweeted on August 21 that the ruling is an indication that she would be convicted.
Feygin suggested Savchenko could eventually be exchanged for Russian prisoners in Ukraine.
The Rostov-on-Don district court has rejected Savchenko’s plea to move the future court hearings from the Russian town of Donetsk to Moscow. Savchenko’s claim was based on the fact that a number of witnesses in her case live in the Moscow region.
Her lawyers tweeted that they had expected this decision. One of them, Ilya Novikov, found a brighter side, nothing that the process had given them an extra month to prepare for examinations.
Savchenko’s second lawyer, Mark Feygin, predicted that the jailed Ukrainian pilot would be sentenced and the governments will later begin “the game of her exchange.”
Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council (CLICK TO ENLARGE):
