Poroshenko seeks peacekeeping mission
UNITED NATIONS – Ukraine’s president has repeated his call for a full United Nations peacekeeping mission, telling the world body that such a mission should be authorized to patrol Ukraine’s border with Russia. Mr. Poroshenko’s call came on September 20 in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly and followed a proposal floated last week by President Vladimir Putin for such a mission. Mr. Putin said on September 14 that U.N. peacekeepers might be deployed on the contact line separating the sides of the conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. And he said there might be other parts where OSCE monitors could operate parallel to a U.N. mission. In his U.N. speech, Mr. Poroshenko said a full-fledged U.N. peacekeeping operation was welcomed. “The launch of a peacekeeping operation will enable [Ukraine] to restore justice and not simply cement the occupation,” Mr. Poroshenko said. The war in eastern Ukraine erupted in early 2014 following Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. At least 10,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. (RFE/RL)
EU conditions for more aid to Ukraine
BRUSSELS – A top European Union finance official said Kyiv needs to do more in fighting corruption and to pass pension and land reforms as conditions for receiving more financial aid from Brussels. Speaking alongside Ukraine’s finance minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, who is the European commissioner for financial services, said Ukraine must also set up a credit register, ensure further privatization and lift trade restrictions with the European Union. The European bloc has made the final installment of a 600-million-euro financial aid package conditional on passage of those reforms. The EU has imposed a tight time frame to enact the reforms, with the deadline for payout looming in January. Mr. Dombrovskis said Brussels wants concrete plans on how those changes will be implemented by the end of October. “We certainly need clarity. I would say maybe not towards mid- but towards the end of next month,” he said. “Indeed, time is relatively short.” Since 2014, the European Union has given Ukraine 2.8 billion euros of financial assistance. (RFE/RL)
Umerov ‘only a citizen of Ukraine’
SYMFEROPOL, Ukraine – A top Crimean Tatar leader declared himself “only a citizen of Ukraine” as he lashed out in a final court statement at Russian prosecutors who have charged him with separatism. Ilmi Umerov, who has repeatedly criticized Russia’s 2014 seizure of the Black Sea region from Ukraine, is the latest in a series of Crimean Tatar leaders whom Russia has targeted with criminal prosecutions. At the September 20 hearing, prosecutor Denys Semenchuk asked the court to give him a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence. Mr. Semenchuk also recommended that Mr. Umerov, 60, who is a qualified doctor, be barred from public activities and teaching medicine for a three-year period. In his last statement to the court, Mr. Umerov, who is deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatars’ self-governing body known as the Mejlis, said that he considers himself “only a citizen of Ukraine.” He told the court: “I call the annexation an annexation and the authorities established [by Russia] as occupational ones. I believe that the borders of 1991 that were inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union must be reinstated. Those borders are recognized in the world and have been confirmed by corresponding documents and agreements between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.” Mr. Umerov stressed that the charges against him have only one goal, “which is to punish those who oppose the annexation.” He also criticized authorities’ order committing him to a psychiatric clinic in August 2016 and pressure he said was imposed on his lawyers as attempts to break his will. He said that the translation of an interview he gave to a Crimean Tatar TV channel into Russian, which formed the basis for the separatism charges, had been done unprofessionally and with mistakes that distorted his remarks. Mr. Umerov, who went on trial June 7 in the Crimean capital, Symferopol, is one of several critics of the Russian takeover who have faced what rights activists say are politically motivated criminal charges at the hands of Russia and the authorities it backs in Crimea. The Moscow-based human rights group Memorial has called the case against Mr. Umerov “illegal and politically motivated.” Mejlis Chairman Refat Chubarov, who was barred from entering the region by a Russian court and resides in Kyiv, has said the case against Umerov is part of a campaign of persecution against Crimean Tatars. (Crimean Desk, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Kyiv diplomats visit teen held in Russia
KYIV – Ukrainian diplomats have visited a Ukrainian teenager held in Russian custody on terrorism-related charges for the first time since his arrest. Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Maryana Betsa wrote on Twitter that Ukrainian consuls visited Pavlo Hryb on September 18. Ms. Betsa said that Ukrainian physicians have not been allowed to examine Mr. Hryb. “We demand doctors’ access,” she wrote. The teen’s father, Ihor Hryb, said earlier that his son has a medical condition, which he did not specify, and needs special treatment and drugs on a regular basis to avoid a possible hemorrhage. Mr. Hryb, 19, went missing in late August after he traveled to Belarus to meet a woman he met online in what his relatives believe was a trap set by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The FSB subsequently informed Kyiv that Mr. Hryb was held in a detention center in Russia on suspicion of abetting terrorism, without giving any details. Ihor Hryb has said his son was openly critical of Russian interference in Ukraine on social media. The Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry on September 8 protested Pavlo Hryb’s detention and demanded that Moscow grant consular access to the teenager “and explain in detail all of the reasons for his detention.” The ministry condemned what it called Russia’s “persecution of Ukrainian citizens in Russia and elsewhere, groundless detentions of Ukrainians, violation of their rights to have fair trials, and their convictions on fabricated and politically motivated charges.” (RFE/RL, with reporting by UNIAN)
Suspended sentence sought for Semena
KYIV – A Russian prosecutor in Crimea has recommended a suspended sentence for Mykola Semena, an RFE/RL contributor who is fighting what he says is a politically motivated separatism charge in court on the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula. At a September 18 hearing in Mr. Semena’s trial, the prosecutor asked the court to find him guilty and hand him a three-year suspended sentence, meaning he would not be imprisoned unless he were to violate the terms of the verdict. The prosecutor also recommended that Mr. Semena, 66, be barred from “public activities” – apparently including journalism – for the same three-year period. The charge against Mr. Semena stems from an article he wrote for RFE/RL’s Krym.Realii (Crimea Realities) website in 2015, a year after Russia seized control of Crimea from Ukraine. The Kremlin-installed prosecutor in Crimea charged that the article had called for the violation of Russia’s territorial integrity. Given the floor for his final statement before the verdict, which is expected on September 22, Mr. Semena repeated his contention that he is innocent. He said that both Ukrainian and Russian law give him the right to express his opinions freely, and that all arguments he has made in his writing have been based on national and international law. “I think this is exactly what any good and law-abiding citizen of any state, including Ukraine or Russia, should always do,” Mr. Semena told the court. “And the state not only has no legal right to try him for that, it has no moral right to punish him for that, especially if the state – through its constitution – has guaranteed freedom of expression and freedom of thought,” he said. “Otherwise the state is doomed.” Mr. Semena also said that public discussion of all issues, including whether or not any particular region is legally part of Russia, is protected by the freedom of expression. “My opinion about Crimea coincides with the opinion of the majority in the world, of international organizations, and of the governments of the majority of the countries,” Mr. Semena told the court, adding that he believes Russia’s position “is not based on the law.” He added, “If I am pronounced guilty it will be a verdict not only for me, a Ukrainian journalist, but a verdict against journalism as a whole in Russia,” he said. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Mikheil Saakashvili arrives in Kyiv
KYIV – Mikheil Saakashvili, the ex-governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast and former president of Georgia, has arrived in Ukraine’s capital, where he vowed to challenge the revocation of his Ukrainian citizenship. Speaking to journalists outside the building of the presidential administration on September 19, Mr. Saakashvili demanded that the presidential office and state bodies provide him and his lawyers with all the documents related to President Petro Poroshenko’s decree stripping him of citizenship. Mr. Saakashvili – formerly a Georgian citizen, then Ukrainian – has been a stateless person since Mr. Poroshenko’s decision in July. He defied Ukrainian authorities on September 10 and made a chaotic crossing into the country from Poland, helped by hundreds of his supporters. Addressing supporters in the western city of Chernivtsi on September 13, Mr. Saakashvili said that he had returned to Ukraine to help solve the country’s “political crisis” – “not simply” to challenge the revocation of his Ukrainian citizenship. On September 18, a court in Ukraine’s western Lviv region was scheduled to start hearings into what officials called his illegal entry into the country, but the hearing was postponed to September 22. Ukraine’s top prosecutor has said that Mr. Saakashvili will not be arrested or extradited to Georgia, where the ex-president is wanted on allegations of corruption during his time in office. “Saakashvili will not be arrested in this case, Saakashvili cannot be extradited from this country while he has a residence permit or other document that he has filed,” Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko said on September 16, suggesting that the stateless ex-leader may have a document allowing him to remain in Ukraine. Mr. Lutsenko also said that those who helped bring Mr. Saakashvili across the border would face criminal charges but would not be arrested. But he added that those who “beat Ukrainian border guards” would face arrest and prosecution. Authorities claim that several border officers were injured in the altercation at the border with Saakashvili’s supporters. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Clashes erupt after acquittals in Odesa
KYIV – Police in Ukraine are investigating clashes that broke out on September 18 after a court acquitted 19 defendants who were tried over deadly violence between pro-Russian and Ukrainian activists in the southern city of Odesa in May 2014. Police used tear gas to disperse some 100 activists protesting the acquittals at a court in Chornomorsk, the town near Odesa where the trial was held. Ruslan Forostyak, adviser to the Odesa regional police chief, said on September 19 that 20 police officers and 15 officers of the National Guard were injured. A total of 48 people were killed in Odesa on May 2, 2014, most of them in a blaze that was apparently set off by firebombs thrown inside a building where they had sought refuge amid the street fighting. Russia and Ukraine have blamed one another for the violence and deaths. The 19 people who were acquitted had been charged with inciting clashes on Odesa’s Hretska Square that led to the death of six people. Two of the acquitted, a Russian and a Ukrainian, were rearrested shortly after the hearing and charged with separatism. (Crimean Desk, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Director of youth camp is arrested
ODESA, Ukraine – A court in Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa has arrested the director of a youth camp, where fire killed three girls on September 15. The Kyiv District Court in Odesa on September 18 placed Petros Sarkisyan in a detention center for two months without possibility of bail on suspicion of violations of fire safety regulations that led to the deaths. Authorities said on September 16 that the fire swept through the camp’s two-story, wooden building shortly before midnight on September 15. Police said that 42 children were inside the building at the time of the fire. After extinguishing the fire, rescue workers found the remains of two girls and said that a third girl was unaccounted for. Fragments of a third body that are believed to belong to the missing girl were found later. Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko on September 18 expressed condolences to the relatives of the three girls and Odesa residents. He also said that he has put the investigations of the tragedy under “special control.” (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service)
Tillerson, Lavrov discuss Ukraine
WASHINGTON – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov met in New York ahead of the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, with Ukraine and Syria key topics of discussion, officials said. The U.S. State Department earlier had said that Mr. Tillerson would travel to the Russian U.N. Mission to meet with his counterpart on September 17. Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert after the session said in a statement that the diplomats “met this evening in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.” She added, “The two recommitted to deconflicting military operations in Syria, reducing the violence, and creating the conditions for the Geneva process to move forward.” Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the meeting covered the crisis in Syria, the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and “Middle East” issues. Mr. Tillerson left the talks without speaking to reporters. (RFE/RL)
Volker comments on Russian proposal
KYIV – The U.S. special envoy for efforts to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine has called a Russian proposal to send United Nations peacekeepers to the region a “step forward” but warns there are still many “obstacles” to the plan suggested by Moscow. Ambassador Kurt Volker on September 16 said, “It’s very interesting that Russia proposed a U.N. protection mission. … This is a step forward in a way bringing it up for discussion and bringing it to the [U.N.] Security Council.” He added, “There’s more on the table now that we can work with.” Speaking on the sidelines of the annual Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, he noted that the mandate of any U.N. force must not “deepen the division” of the country. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that the purpose of a proposed U.N.-mandated peacekeeping mission in war-torn eastern Ukraine must be to foster peace, not to cement what he called “Russia’s occupation” of a chunk of his country. Mr. Poroshenko said the mission should patrol the whole conflict zone, including the border between Russia and the separatist-held parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which Kyiv says is used to ship weapons and military personnel in from Russia. Russia initially indicated that under its plan, the peacekeepers would operate only along the frontline separating Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists. Russia also said the plan should be subject to approval by the separatists. But Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 11 signaled his willingness to look into the idea of deploying the peacekeepers not only along the conflict line but also in other areas where monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe work. Some 600 observers from the OSCE are in eastern Ukraine, but their presence has failed to halt the fighting. Ambassador Volker reiterated that the U.N. force’s mandate should not be limited to protecting the OSCE observers along the conflict demarcation line between zones controlled by Kyiv and those held by the pro-Russia separatists. The current proposal, he said, “would only protect monitors, not people. It would not give access to control the Russia-Ukraine border. There’s a lot of obstacles, a lot of problems with the way it was proposed.” Mr. Volker said the force should control the Ukrainian side of the border with Russia, enabling it to help prevent any movement of heavy weapons from Russia to the separatists. The comments came after the U.S. envoy early on September 16 wrote on Twitter that “The conflict in eastern Ukraine is not an indigenous uprising; it’s an externally driven conflict & Russia is responsible.” (RFE/RL, with reporting by Reuters, AFP, TASS and Interfax)