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Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates testified in federal court Thursday against Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig about the ex-counsel's Ukraine-related work for Paul Manafort, Politico reported. Gates was a top lieutenant to Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman, for approximately 10 years. During that time, Manafort supervised a 2012 review conducted by Craig of the abuse-of-power trial of ex-Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, according to Politico. While the review was presented as an independent probe of the trial, it was commissioned by Manafort's primary client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and bankrolled by Victor Pinchuk, a steel oligarch and...

A comedian whose political experience is limited to playing the president on TV vowed to tackle Ukraine's corruption, as he voted Sunday in the first stage of a presidential election he is tipped to win. Actor Volodymyr Zelensky's bid began as a long shot but he has leapfrogged establishment politicians amid public anger over graft and stagnating living standards. "A new life is beginning, a good life, without corruption, without bribes," the 41-year-old told journalists as he voted with his wife at a Kiev polling station. If elected, the entertainer will take the reins of a country fighting Russia-backed separatists...

Ukraine’s future is again bound up in the political ambitions of Yulia Tymoshenko. The fate of the two-time prime minister and her country are once more tightly woven together — like the blonde halo braid that made her an international icon. Only this time, Ukraine is at war, and that means Tymoshenko’s third run for president could have implications far beyond her country’s borders, potentially rewriting relations between Russia and the West and unbalancing the geopolitical order.

As part of its exclusive series on Libya during the rule of late leader Moammar al-Gaddafi, Asharq Al-Awsat examines the regime’s ties with local and foreign powers, including its attempts to finance western presidential campaigns, particularly in France, the United States and Ukraine. Witnesses from the former regime said that Tripoli had spent some 50 million euros in 2007 to fund the campaign of French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Lebanese businessman Ziad Takeieddine, who was present at Sarkozy’s meetings with Gaddafi revealed that the “figures were much higher than that.” Tripoli also pumped 5 million dollars in the presidential campaign...

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The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US’s indifferent response to it. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America’s most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades. As Gordon Chang noted at a symposium in Los Angeles last month hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, since President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, the Chinese have responded to his overtures of goodwill and appeasement with intensified aggression against the US’s Asian allies and against US warships. In 2012, China seized the Scarborough Shoal from the...

U.S. mercenaries are not involved in suppressing riots in southeastern Ukraine, the White House said on Tuesday, citing the Greystone private military organization. "I would point you to what the company [Greystone] itself has said in the past, which is that this is not true," White House press secretary Jay Carney said at a press conference.

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Authorities in Ukraine's capital are warning that they are prepared to use force to clear several government buildings that have been seized by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The country's interior minister says the standoff in Luhansk and two neighboring regions must be resolved within the next two days. As he spoke, anti-government protesters in Luhansk raised high barricades along a thoroughfare in front of the security service building. Hundreds of supporters camped outside overnight and chanted the name of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The US Secretary of State spoke today of the unacceptability of invading a sovereign country on phony pretexts in order to assert one’s own interests in the 21st century. But no, he was not speaking about the United States, as one might have thought. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” Kerry said during an interview with NBC. “This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext. It’s really 19th century behaviour in the 21st century.” Kerry has also threatened to isolate Russia economically and...

VIDEO AT LINK On Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Tuesday, network senior political analyst Brit Hume concurred with a statement Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had made earlier in the day about the failings of the President Barack Obama’s foreign policy under the direction of Secretary of State John Kerry. According to Hume, much of what the Obama administration had aimed to accomplish was reliant on Russia, which as of now has a relationship with the United States in disrepair.

American spies have spotted all the signs of an all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why won’t they tell the Ukrainians about the forces on their border? U.S. intelligence agencies now have detailed information that Russia has amassed the kind of forces needed for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But the Obama administration hasn’t shared with Ukraine the imagery, intercepts, and analysis that pinpont (sic) the location of the Russian troops ready to seize more Ukrainian land, The Daily Beast has learned. President Obama has repeatedly and publicly expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people—and warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin that there...

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — From his office atop the world’s biggest Jewish community center, Shmuel Kaminezki, the chief rabbi of this eastern Ukrainian city, has followed with dismay Russian claims that Ukraine is now in the hands of neo-Nazi extremists — and struggled to calm his panicked 85-year-old mother in New York. Raised in Russia and a regular viewer of Russian television, she “calls every day to ask, ‘Have the pogroms happened yet?' ” Rabbi Kaminezki said. He tells his mother that they have not, and that she should stop watching Russian TV. “It is a total lie,” he said. “Jews are...

UkrInform.ua reports that the deputy head of Ukraine’s Presidential Administration, Andriy Senchenko, has announced that an agreement has been reached on the return of Ukraine’s ships from Russian-held Crimea. The first ships to return will be the corvette Ternopil, the missile boat Priluki and the tanker, Fastov, all of which are currently in Sevastopol. Simultaneously, the head of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s Crimean media centre, Vladislav Seleznev, announced that an agreement had been made on the return of Ukrainian aircraft from Crimea, adding that: One plane will fly home under its own power following maintenance, several more will be transported...

Russia is to return Tupolev Tu-22M3 ‘Backfire’ long-range supersonic bombers to Crimea by 2016 as part of a build-up of maritime aviation assets on the strategic peninsula, which was seized by Moscow’s military forces earlier this month, reports Jane’s. The nuclear-capable bombers were the backbone of Soviet naval strike units during the Cold War but were subsequently withdrawn from bases in Crimea as part of the consolidation of Russian naval aviation and force level restrictions on the peninsula imposed by the Kiev government.

A senior Christian Democrat criticized German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's stance on Ukraine and Russia in a signal of a possible rift appearing within Chancellor Angela Merkel's right-left coalition over relations with Moscow. Conservative leader Merkel and Steinmeier, who is a senior member of the Social Democrats (SPD), have been at pains to stress how closely they are coordinating on policy since the Ukraine crisis began, despite the traditionally warmer ties to Moscow maintained by the leftist SPD.

<p>Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday threatened Russia with tougher economic sanctions if it fails to back down from its chaotic involvement in Ukraine.</p> <p>"What we see from Russia is an illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilize a sovereign state and create a contrived crisis with paid operatives across an international boundary," Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.</p>

If you've been following events in Ukraine closely, you may have seen maps, available at electoralgeography.com, showing how the ethnic Russian areas voted heavily for one candidate and the ethnic Ukrainian areas for another. However, as the eminent historians of Eastern Europe Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have written, the division is not simply based on ethnicity or language. Almost all Ukrainians can speak Russian and most can speak or at least understand the closely related Ukrainian. The maps suggest a different story. This division of Ukraine is based, most of all, on history. Consider the far western part of...

Russia warned Tuesday that any use of force in Ukraine's eastern region could lead to civil war, as Kiev seeks to regain control after pro-Moscow uprisings in three cities. Pro-Russian protesters seized government buildings in the three cities of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv on Sunday. Rebels occupying Donetsk's regional government building Monday declared a "people's republic" and called for a referendum on secession from Ukraine to be held by May 11.

Police detained 70 people occupying a regional administration building in eastern Ukraine overnight, but pro-Moscow protesters held out in a standoff in two other cities in what Kiev called a Russian-led plan to dismember the country. Kiev says the seizure of public buildings in eastern Ukraine's mainly Russian-speaking industrial heartland on Sunday night is a replay of events in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed last month.

Ukraine's state security service on Tuesday said that pro-Russian separatists have placed explosives in a building they seized in the eastern city of Luhansk and are using weapons to hold around 60 people against their will. Pro-Russian separatists occupied the SBU building on Sunday evening in one of a series of attacks in the east of the country. At least nine people were injured when the separatists broke doors and windows throughout the building and raised the Russian flag.