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City's chief rabbi states pamphlet is fake, claiming it is meant to discredit pro-Russian protesters or Jewish community The barricades outside the Donetsk regional administration building are plastered with anti-fascist posters. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images The barricades that mark the entrance to the "Donetsk People's Republic" are plastered with anti-fascist posters, including an American flag with a swastika in place of the stars. The pro-Russian protestors who have set up their own government in the occupied administration building see the new Kiev regime as dominated by intolerant Ukrainian nationalists, which is why it was more than a little ironic when...

The Jewish state has diplomatic, geographic, economic – and Jewish – reasons to shun the international arena’s hottest flash point. Pro-Russian supporters in Ukraine attend a rally in the Crimea. Pro-Russian supporters in Ukraine attend a rally in the Crimea. Photo: REUTERS Bored by life in the opposition and missing his previous career’s action, Moshe Dayan decided to go to Vietnam, take a close look at what then was the world’s only major war, and report his impressions in several newspapers. The Americans – still confident of their victory – rolled out the red carpet for the celebrated general as...

As those concerned with Ukraine waited skeptically for April 16 peace talks among Ukraine, Russia, the European Union and the United States in Geneva, Russian President Vladimir Putin heated up the conflict, suggesting that he will not stop until Ukraine is destroyed as a sovereign nation. He called Ukrainians and Russian one nation and threatened with a full-scale invasion of the Russian army. [....] An imperialistic mood was added by words the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, TV host Dmitry Kiseliov, who said he felt that Russia is being “suffocated by NATO,” and Putin’s joke that Russian won’t take Alaska back from...

The news is too much with us late and soon, and watching and listening we lay waste our powers. Flashing endlessly by, the unceasing flow of BREAKING NEWS seduces and betrays, mainly by pretending to be new. Even though, as the Preacher said, what has been will be. The particulars of the story may change, but not the human condition. The names may be new, but the stories remain remarkably the same, just as weapons change but war remains the bloody same. Yet here and there in the familiar murk of the news there comes a sudden shaft of...

What Ukrainians and the rest of the world see as Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees as Novorossiya, or New Russia. That Novorossiya is Ukrainian is a historical injustice, Putin said, in his hours-long live television question-and-answer session on April 17. “I will remind you, using the terminology of the czarist times, this is Novorossiya: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolayiv, Odesa were not part of Ukraine in czarist times. These are territories that were passed on to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government.” Putin said. “Why did they do it? God only knows.” [....] In his speech, Putin...

It’s a textbook example, the officials said, of the military art of deception that Russia calls “maskirovka,” or masking their appearance to blend in with local forces. The Russians have historically been very good at it and are proud of their capabilities. Last year, Russian state-run television news aired a story about the elite teams that train for exactly this kind of cloaked missions abroad.

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Empire an "evil empire," the phrase reflected his conviction that while the East-West struggle was indeed a global geostrategic conflict, it had a deep moral dimension. If Americans did not see the Cold War as he did, a battle between good and evil, Reagan knew that they would indefinitely sacrifice neither the wealth of the nation nor the blood of its sons to sustain it. That is in the character of Americans. Jimmy Carter had sought to remove that moral dimension by declaring, "We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism." But with...

April 15 – German company RWE AG has started reverse delivery of gas through Poland to Ukraine. According to the agreement the volume of supplied gas may amount to 10 billion cubic meters per year. April 15 – Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has identified the leader of Russian subversive group, which is operating in Sloviansk. He is Igor Strelkov, the citizen of Russian Federation and special squad officer of Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. SSU has started criminal inquiry regarding the fact of the ordering of intentional murder by...

But it may be Andriy Parubiy, the head of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, who holds the true smoking gun. Parubiy, a former lawmaker and Euromaidan protest leader, announced on April 15 that SBU agents had detained officers from the Russian Defense Ministry's main intelligence wing, the GRU, for involvement in the eastern actions. The "Kyiv Post" later identified the main detainee as Igor Strelkov, a GRU commanding officer and the leader of the paramilitary group that has taken control in the eastern city of Slovyansk. The SBU said Strelkov arrived in Crimea at the beginning of March and...

Russia should not be concerned about NATO expansion, as they are not going to do anything rather than some symbolic financial gestures, Jeffrey F. Addicott, Director of Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in Texas told RIA Novosti. “Putin understands that NATO is largely a paper tiger,” Addicott said, adding that the alliance is now more in a defensive mode. “The Russian leader also realizes that their signals to send out some additional ships here and there, or do some additional flights really mean nothing.” Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke for almost four hours to...

MOSCOW — Russia's economy has been hit hard by the turmoil in neighboring Ukraine, Kremlin officials said Wednesday, as pro-Russia separatists battled to take over more territory in Ukraine's east — and potentially add to Moscow's economic burden. Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region last month and the instability it created in Russian financial markets were cited by government officials for record capital flight and sharply downgraded growth forecasts for the country. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that instead of projected 2.5% growth this year, Russia's economy might show no growth at all.

...Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday again vigorously denied Western claims that Russian forces were operating in eastern Ukraine. But he also finally confirmed what had long been suspected and that he had repeatedly denied: that the well-armed forces with no insignia on their uniforms that took control of Crimea last month were in fact Russian troops.

Sanctions imposed against Russia are working as a deterrent, President Barack Obama and other White House senior administration officials said Wednesday in a detailed defense and explanation of the U.S. response to the escalating crisis in Ukraine. And new sanctions could be imposed as early as Friday, with key Putin allies, institutions and top oligarchs among the targets, other senior administration officials said.

Dmitry Tymchuk (Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine) Brothers and sisters, Here’s the Summary for April 17, 2014. The bad news: 1. Putin has now stepped into the astral plane. We shouldn’t expect his return. Today his “straight line” – is a protocol of feverish delirium. Just take his story about eastern Ukraine as “New Russia with roots related to Russia” as an example. And his story that the Russian military in easterm Ukraine is nothing but “nonsense?” This Kremlin storyteller likewise prophesied while foaming at the mouth in March that there were no Russian troops in Crimea. And...

Russian Spy Planes in U.S. Skies By Eli Lake 12 hours ago The Daily Beast The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military and American intelligence agencies have quietly pushed the White House in recent weeks to deny a new Russian surveillance plane the right to fly over U.S. territory. This week, the White House finally began consideration of the decision whether to certify the new Russian aircraft under the so-called “Open Skies Treaty.” And now the question becomes: Will the spies and generals get their way? As the United States and Russia face off publicly over Ukraine, behind...

Ukraine is on the frontline of Russia v US superpower tensions, while a major naval base there makes it the bottom line underlying this confrontation, Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, told RT. RT: Is Crimea becoming a new battleground between East and the West? Richard Sakwa: Putin describes the things in his speech that he told about on March 18. There is a mixture of two things going on at the moment. There is the enlargement of the EU which in the past was considered fairly benign. What happened is its mixture...

According to the information of the resistance, today, 17 April, Druzhkovka, Donetsk region, the extremists and the Russian special forces blocked a convoy of Ukrainian law-enforcers. In particular, the Group of the Ukrainian security services, peredvigavšaâsâ convoy, at 22.30 was stopped by traffic police and blocked a group of extremists of up to 500 people. As emissaries of the Informational resistance ", were in this group and the Russian military personnel. The unit was headed by Russian officer-notorious IGOR STRELKOV, who introduced himself as "Colonel of the ARMED FORCES of the RUSSIAN FEDERATION of the "special group"-"Crimea". Other members of...

The agreements reached between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the European Union in Geneva on the vacation of roads, streets and squares in Ukraine do not concern the protesters on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv, Acting Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deschytsia has said.

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tim Graham. For its second season, the creators of the FX series "The Americans" have chosen a new source for insight into the Cold War during the Reagan years -- one Lt. Col. Oliver North. It's a dramatic reversal from the first season, and it has infuriated some hard leftists. The show began with the shocking promise from creator Joel Weisberg that the series' heroes would be KGB agents: "We're making them the sympathetic characters. I'd go so far as to say they're the heroes." It quickly became apparent that these characters could...

President Obama is right. He told Major Garrett of CBS this week that "Mr. Putin's decisions aren't just bad for Ukraine. Over the long term, they're going to be bad for Russia." I believe that Putin's adventures in Russia's "near abroad" are a mistake. Indeed, they are part of a whole tapestry of wrongheadedness. It's also bad for the Kremlin to crush dissent, censor the news and hobble the economy by handing it over to oligarchs and a kleptocratic bureaucracy. Putin's scapegoating and demonizing of gays isn't only morally wrong, it's not in Russia's long-term interests either. That Putin prefers...