Section: Atlantic Council (USA)
From Ordinary Business Trip to Russian Jail: Former Ukrainian Political Prisoner Exhorts West to Keep Pressure on Russia
Editor’s Note: Yuriy Yatsenko testified before the US Helsinki Commission in Washington on December 11, 2015. His remarks have been shortened.I am a Ukrainian citizen who was illegally arrested and detained by the Russian Federation for over a year for political reasons. Nadiya Savchenko, Oleg Sentsov, and others who are less known have...
What Will 2016 Mean for Ukraine?
In 2015, Ukraine proved it wasn’t a pushover. The country united in the face of Russian aggression and Russian President Vladimir Putin learned that if he wanted his Novorossiya project, it was going to cost him more than a few little green men.Notably, the war in Ukraine was completely absent from Putin’s December 2015 address to the...
New Russian Management of the Donbas Signifies Putin May Be Ready to Negotiate
On December 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed one of his close, trusted aides, Boris Gryzlov, Russia’s representative in the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, which concluded the two Minsk agreements on the Donbas in September 2014 and February 2015. This appointment suggests an important change in Russia’s policy...
Civil Service Reform May Revolutionize Ukraine
It took a staggering sixteen months and it wasn’t easy. The old guard resisted it every step of the way. Ukraine’s parliament passed civil service reform, one of the highest priorities of the Euromaidan’s young reformers, on December 10.The Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR), a civic group, described the development as...
An Alliance Deterred
NATO leaders intended the Alliance’s Trident Juncture military exercises, in part, to send a message to Russia that they would not hesitate to defend allied territory. That intention was commendable. But one wonders how exercises in the western Mediterranean will deter Russian ambitions that lie 3,000 km away in Ukraine and on the borders...
The Kremlin’s Dangerous New Threat in Ukraine
Fighting continues to gradually intensify in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin-backed militants are now using heavy weapons, including tanks, artillery, and ferocious Grad rocket systems, sporadically. Moscow’s rationale behind this latest escalation is to achieve a frozen conflict by gradually sabotaging the execution of the Minsk II ceasefire...
The Revolutionary Path to Reform for Ukraine’s National Police
Ukrainians are growing increasingly impatient with Ukraine’s lack of reforms. But the country’s police reforms are working, says Khatia Dekanoidze, the newly-appointed chief of the Ukrainian National Police.How does she know?”The number one tool to…measure effectiveness of police is trust,” Dekanoidze said on...
Ukraine: Society No Longer Willing to Compromise with a Compromise
Whoever directed the show in Ukraine’s parliament on December 11—when a ruling-party coalition parliamentarian dragged Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk from the podium—may have achieved their objective: there was no serious discussion of the government’s record that day. As a result of internal and external compromises, the current...
“Ukraine is a work in progress by Putin,” Says General Wesley Clark
Retired US Army General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, has campaigned since 2014 to convince Western governments to provide lethal aid to Ukraine to fend off Russia’s occupation of 9 percent of its territory.In a wide-ranging interview, he talked about why this hasn’t happened and about Russian President...
Should Ukraine Forget Its History?
On November 25, 2010, while on a state visit to Kyiv, Israel’s President Shimon Peres stated that, “If Ukrainians were to ask me for advice, I would say: forget history.” Coming from the president of a country steeped in history, the comment was at first glance bizarre. Directed at a country embroiled in seemingly endless...
