Commentary

A UN maritime tribunal has ruled that Russia must “immediately” release 24 Ukrainian sailors and three Ukrainian naval vessels captured by Russia in November. The Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea delivered its ruling on May 25 on the case Ukraine brought against Russia. Russia seized the ships in November near the Kerch Strait bridge, which connects the Russian mainland to the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Relations between Russia and Ukraine have been tense since Moscow annexed Crimea in March 2014 and began providing military, political, and economic support to separatist formations waging a war against Kyiv in parts of eastern Ukraine. Tribunal President Jin-Hyun Paik said that judges decided Russia must "immediately" return the three ships to Ukraine's custody and release the sailors and allow them to return to Ukraine. Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that Russia could send a positive signal by adhering to the ruling...

On May 21, newly-appointed Ukrainian Presidential Administration head Andriy Bohdan stirred up controversy with Ukrainian political commentators when he announced the intentions of Ukraine’s new authorities to conduct a referendum on a peace deal with Russia regarding Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine broken off from government control with the help of Russian financial and military support. “So it wouldn’t be some politician making a decision breaking apart society, but so the people, society itself would make this decision, whether our deal suits them,” Bohdan said, adding that the team of newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyi is forced to search for a compromise with Russia.“The only thing is, Volodymyr Zelenskyi said that we don’t trade our territories and our people,” Bohdan noted, referring to Zelenskyi’s statement in one of his rare appearances at a political talk show...

ainian Archbishop Borys Gudziak, a visionary leader in the Catholic Church and higher education, will be presented with the Notre Dame Award in a ceremony June 29 in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., announced on May 6. “In the face of innumerable challenges, Archbishop Gudziak has made the Ukrainian Catholic University a center for cultural thought, Christian witness and the formation of a Ukrainian society based on human dignity,” Father Jenkins said. “At the same time, he has steadfastly provided dedicated pastoral guidance to members of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. It will be an honor to recognize his courageous and faithful service when we visit Ukraine in June”...

“Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse … The mother begs, ‘Soldier, kill me!’ ” The late Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote this profoundly disturbing narrative in a poem called “Prussian Nights” in 1945, as he witnessed his fellow soldiers in the communist Soviet Red Army engaging in mass looting and raping in Eastern Germany as they advanced on Adolf Hitler’s Berlin...

The 20th anniversary of a landmark U.S. foreign policy initiative has slipped by virtually unnoticed. In 1999, NATO began its post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, taking on three new members: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Last month, the alliance rather quietly marked that event — as well as the 70th anniversary of its founding — at a meeting of foreign ministers in Washington, rather than a heads-of-state gathering that the occasion seemed to merit. This was no accident, given the near-certainty that President Donald Trump would have spoiled any NATO summit he attended. It was also a pity, because NATO expansion ranks as one of the great U.S. foreign policy successes of the post-Cold War era...

Ukraine has turned to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) over Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian naval vessels and their crew. Critical hearings are due on May 10-11, 2019 into Ukraine’s application for provisional measures to get the 24 men released. Russia has a long track record of flouting international rulings and has just announced that it will not attend the open hearings on May 10. This ruling will, however, matter and Moscow is currently endeavouring to ‘prove’ that ITLOS does not have jurisdiction over the case. Russia could checkmate itself since one of the reasons why the Tribunal would decide it does not have jurisdiction is if it was proven that this was part of military conflict, which Russia has every reason to deny...

Brazen intrusions into Crimean Tatar homes by men with machine guns have become common in Russian-occupied Crimea, but there were some differences on 30 April. The searches were even more desultory than normal, which was not surprising since they were targeting Crimean Tatar activists and claimed to be looking for drugs which they knew in advance they would not find. None, that is, which they had not brought themselves to plant which was doubtless one of the menacing messages that the raids were intended to leave...

The morning of Ukraine’s presidential election, Lyudmyla Razumova stood in the kitchen of her new house, less than a mile from the front line of a five-year war between Russia-backed separatists [ed. Russia led forces] and Ukrainian forces. Holding her infant grandson, who smiled as he occasionally spit up, she explained how violence has upended life in this coastal village. In 2016 Russian artillery shells struck Ms. Lyudmyla’s property, leaving her old house and a detached garage damaged and burning. Despite living among military checkpoints and minefields, she refused to leave. “I have lived here for 44 years—my whole life,” Ms. Lyudmyla said. “My parents and grandparents lived here”...

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has announced the launch of a special court to try corruption cases ahead of a presidential election runoff next week. The anti-corruption court is being set up as part of Ukraine's $3.9bn loan programme with the IMF, with the intention of rooting out entrenched corruption and insulating court decisions from political pressure or bribery. Poroshenko said on Thursday that the selection process for the judges had taken seven months...

On April 3, 2019 the first group of Roto7 left Quebec to Ukraine to take part in the operation UNIFIER. This group of one hundred soldiers is mainly formed by members of the 5th mechanized brigade group of Canada (5e Groupe-brigade mécanisé du Canada (5 GBMC). They aim to support Ukrainian Security Forces...