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Putin is doubling down on the separatists. We continue to see arms flow across border from Russia to Ukraine.Russia is also firing artillery from within Russia into Ukraine.Although our preference is a diplomatic solution to Ukraine crisis, we remain ready to impose further costs on Russia as warranted

When president Obama announced last week that he would be imposing of a new round of sanctions on Russia, he made sure to stress that the package was designed to inflict “maximum” damage on Russia, “while limiting any spillover effects on American companies.” Left unmentioned: the fact that, earlier that same day, officials from the European Union called to inform our State Dept. that they wouldn’t be able to follow suit. If the administration wanted to go forward, they said, it would need to do so unilaterally. Less than a week before, a State Dept. official testified before the Senate...

What follows is testimony delivered on Wednesday by UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer, at the UN Human Rights Council Emergency Session on Gaza, in Geneva. The Palestinian ambassador to the UNHRC, together with Iran, Syria, Egypt, Cuba and Venezuela had tried but failed to silence Mr. Neuer. As expected, the council voted 29 to 1 (USA), with 17 abstaining (EU & others), to condemn Israel for “gross violations of international human rights,” and it created a new commission of inquiry. ... An entire nation—towns, villages and cities, from the Negev Desert up to the Galilee, from the Judean hills...

<p>"President Obama and those around him simply do not understand the world," Fox News strategic analyst Ralph Peters cautioned Tuesday while discussing the MH17 crash on "America's Newsroom."</p> <p>"They don't understand the world's brutality, its cruelty, its savagery. They just don't get it."</p>

The two big international headlines of the moment are the downing of the Malaysian jet over Ukraine and Israel’s incursion into Gaza. On the face of it, these two stories don’t have much in common, but they are in fact part of the same story. To know Israel it helps to know Ukraine, and to know Ukraine it helps to know Israel. This weekend will mark the 70th anniversary of the day the Soviets re-took the city of Lviv (or Lvov, or Lemberg, according to taste) in western Ukraine, and ended a three-year German occupation. Before the Germans arrived, there...

"The official statistics on migration are very low," said Mikhail Gorshkov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology (ISRAS), a state-funded body. "It's a wake up call for our politicians when someone wants to leave their home country: What is missing for him?" Echoing the post-Soviet brain drain, sociologists say Russia is bleeding exactly the kind of people it needs to plug a skilled labour shortage and diversify the economy away from reliance on energy exports. "We are losing the most educated, most active, most entrepreneurial people," Lev Gudkov, director of the independent Moscow-based Levada Centre pollster....

The term “Cold War” is traced back to George Orwell’s 1945 essay “You and the Atomic Bomb.” Like Orwell’s other works, this essay can be called prophetic. In it, he describes what the world would look like if the atomic bomb, although costly and complicated, was accessible to all regimes. He describes countries as living in a perpetual state of “cold war” with their neighbors in a time of “peace with no peace.” The Cold War started immediately after World War II, when former allies began to clash in ideology. In one corner, you had the WWII Western allies, represented...

Obama administration officials said Thursday that Russia is firing artillery from its own territory into Ukraine to hit Ukrainian military sites, pointing to escalating Russian involvement in the deadly conflict. “This clearly is a military escalation,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said, adding there is no question that Russian military—as opposed to Russia-backed separatists—are firing the shots. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf first made the accusation during a press briefing earlier Thursday. She also claimed Moscow is boosting its military shipments to pro-Russian separatists. …

To judge by the conflicting reports coming from rebel Ukrainian leaders on the issue of whether they have access to the powerful Buk anti-aircraft missile system – believed to have brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 – it is clear that Putin's proxies are nothing more than an undisciplined rabble. In an interview with Reuters, Alexander Khodakovsky, the commander of the rebels' Vostok Battalion, said that the rebels did possess this type of missile system. He even admitted that it could now have been sent back to Russia in order to remove any evidence of its presence in rebel-held territory....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States said on Thursday that Russia was firing artillery across the border into Ukraine to target Ukrainian military positions in the conflict against pro-Russian separatists. “We have new evidence that the Russians intend to deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine, and have evidence that Russia is firing artillery from within Russia to attack Ukrainian military positions,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

Günther Oettinger Reuters Reuters EU threatens to refuse to help Russia extract oil More details here: http://tsn.ua/svit/yes-pogrozhuye-vidmovitisya-dopomagati-rosiyi-dobuvati-naftu-the-times-360415.html If the Kremlin does not change its position on Ukraine, the EU will cease to provide technical support in the extraction of oil. EU threatens to abandon support of the European Union threatens oil extract of refuse help to extract oil in the Arctic if the Kremlin does not change its position on Ukraine and begins to work on de-escalation. According to British newspaper The Times, it said European Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger. In particular, the provision of technical assistance. The...

Five months after the first pictures surfaced in February 2014, the Type 055 cruiser testing rig at Wuhan has taken significant steps towards completion. The advantages of a land based test rig allow Chinese naval engineers to make cheaper adjustments and modifications to the electronics, compared to rebuilding an expensive cruiser on sea trials. Once launched, the Type 055 cruiser will be among the world's most powerful surface combatant warships, giving the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) a multipurpose warship useful for both blue water expeditionary warfare and anti-access/area denial missions. While much scaffolding remains, the photos show recent additions...

Separatists fighting the Kiev government claimed credit for shooting down two warplanes Wednesday over eastern Ukraine near where a passenger airliner crashed last week after being struck by a missile. The attack on the warplanes came just six days after the Malaysia Airlines disaster...

18 Ukrainian servicemen have returned home after undergoing medical treatment at hospitals in the Russian southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Zvarych told Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday, July 24.

The Communist Party of Ukraine will cease to exist on Thursday, the speaker of Ukraine's parliament announced. "We only have to tolerate this party for another day," Verkhovnaya Rada speaker Oleksandr Turchinov said on Wednesday in comments carried by online news portal Ostro.org. Discussion of the Communist Party's dissolution began in earnest in May, after party leader Petro Simonenko said that if he were in charge of the country, he would immediately call back the troops from eastern Ukraine, referring to the military operations taking place there as acts of "war against the people," RIA Novosti reported. Turchinov, who was...

Russia, Israel Joining Efforts to Improve International Terrorism Law RIA Novosti July 23, 2014 MOSCOW, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - At meetings in Jerusalem Russia’s Federation Council members, led by the council’s foreign affairs committee chairman Mikhail Margelov, raised the proposal for a unified approach to terrorism. “As lawmakers we could propose to the international organizations, first of all the UN, to finally define this term and the approach to eliminating terrorists,” Vladimir Kulakov, first deputy chairman of procedures committee and head of Russia’s delegation to the OSCE Parliamentarian Assembly, was quoted as saying by the statement. Russia’s Israeli counterparts...

Russian soldiers VK-page shows RUSSIA is shelling Ukraine with heavy artillery Valdimir Petrov @_hedder found evidence of a Russian artillery unit shelling Ukrainian positions from Russian territory, because a soldier from this unit is posting photos on his VKontakte page (the Russian Facebook). Or course immediately after discovering this, his page has been deleted. But the info is still here: "all night we were cannoning Ukraine"

Valdimir Petrov found evidence of a Russian artillery unit shelling Ukrainian positions from Russian territory, because a soldier from this unit is posting photos on his VKontakte page (the Russian Facebook). Or course immediately after discovering this, his page has been deleted. But the info is still here:

Russia's Federal Penal Service said that the country's inmates would soon be contributing to public works including the construction of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea and a cleanup operation in the Sochi region, the Kommersant newspaper reported Wednesday.

Hamas continues to be uncompromising in its position regarding an international cease-fire, AFP reports Wednesday. "We reject today and will reject in the future," Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Meshaal insisted, in a public speech in Qatar. Meshaal insisted that Israel must accept his list of unprecedented conditions for a cease-fire - which included lifting several security measures, such as the naval blockade and border control, designed to prevent terrorists entering into Israel, as well as re-releasing terrorists arrested earlier this month - and only then will Hamas deliberate with Israel on a date for a cease-fire. Meshaal claimed that the terms...