March 4: Russia is supporting the separatists in eastern Ukraine with approximately 12 thousand Russian soldiers

February 7 – 5 Ukrainian military were killed and 26 injured in the conflict area in Donbas in the last 24 hours, – informedVolodymyr Polevyi, deputy head of the Information Center of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

February 7 – President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko met with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during Munich Security Conference. NATO Secretary General has said that the alliance is strengthening collective security system as well as spoke about providing political and practical support to Ukraine on behalf of NATO.

February 7 – The West should not rule out military resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, – said on Saturday in MunichSupreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations, Gen. Philip Breedlove, writes Spiegel Online. "We are not talking about sending troops to Ukraine," – said Breedlove. In addition, he called Vladimir Putin's proposals on the resolution of the conflict in eastern Ukraine "totally unacceptable".

February 7 – President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has held tripartite talks with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US Vice President Joe Biden – "The parties have coordinated further steps and stressed the need for an immediate ceasefire as well as continued dialogue on the implementation of all provisions of the Minsk agreements".

February 7 – Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has publicized intercepted conversations, which suggest that Russian military are provoking clashes between the ATO forces and militants of "People's Republic of Donetsk". They must be getting new "arguments" ready for Putin's negotiations.

February 7 – Armed Forces and the National Guards of Ukraine have received new military equipment – a modernized armored vehicle "Spartan", equipped with heavy machine gun and "Stugna" missiles.

February 7 – Ukraine is ready to support ceasefire at any time, – stated the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko in his comments to journalists at Munich Security Conference. Whereas the issues of state's federal structure or the autonomy of certain regions (Putin's wishes), may only be decided at a national referendum, not in Moscow or Berlin. All is needed for peace in Donbas is closed borders with Russian Federation and withdrawal of Russian troops, not peacekeeping forces. In his speech at Munich Security Conference, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko presented the passports and military service cards of Russian soldiers who "must have gotten lost in Ukraine" and were detained by Ukrainian military.

Near Debaltseve after attack Russian terrorists appeared "cemetery" Russian tanks (video).

Poroshenko in Munich (20 min)

By Taras Kuzio

Arm Ukraine and force Putin back to the negotiating table

Russia, despite its repeated denials, is sending large quantities of military equipment to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine along with 9,000 of its troops. Movement of Russian forces, including the Pantsir-S1 missile system, are being tracked by think tanks and western intelligence agencies. Only Russian professional (not conscript) troops and intelligence officers can operate highly sophisticated Russian military equipment – not irregular separatist forces.

Respected Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer has concluded that the aim of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, is to destroy Ukraine's independence by installing a satrap in Kiev similar to Chechen warlord Razman Kadyrov, thereby ending Kiev's goal of integration into Europe.

Putin reportedly told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Kiev should deal with the separatists by buying them off with autonomy and money as he had in Chechnya, which to her was unacceptable.

Russia and its separatist proxies have never abided by the September Minsk peace accords and last month tore them up and demand a new agreement that would lend legitimacy to their territorial gains. Military assaults have claimed a growing number of civilian lives, including 40 in rocket attacks on the port city of Mariupol and a Luhansk hospital, with the total number of civilians killed rising to 5, 500, according to the UN. Growing numbers of combatants continue to die on both sides, as illustrated by these gruesome photos of a column of 16 Russian and separatist tanks that was destroyed yesterday.

In the face of the new Russian-backed offensive, pressure on US President Barack Obama to send defensive military equipment to Ukraine is becoming ever more intense. The release of a report for the Atlantic Council of the US by eight US ambassadors calling for military assistance was published along with a crescendo of commentaries in The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times (here, here andhere), The Wall Street Journal (here and here), The Washington Post, The New York Times, The American Interest, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and Spiegel Online.

This chorus of support was backed by influential former US National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A bipartisan group led by Republican and Democratic Senators Rob Portman and Dick Durbin called for military assistance to Ukraine "to defend its sovereign borders against escalating Russian aggression".

The New York Times reported that the US was considering supplying arms to Ukraine, something reportedly confirmed by Douglas Lute, the US Ambassador to Nato. Ashton Carter, President Obama's choice to become his fourth Defence Secretary, said three days later he was "very much inclined" to provide arms to Ukraine to fight Russian-backed separatists.

Ukraine has been seeking western weapons since the summer of last year but so far has received only non-lethal equipment such as winter clothing, bullet proof vests and night vision goggles. The US did send 20 light counter-mortar radars late last year and, with two-decades of cooperation in Nato's Partnership for Peace programme, is beginning to train four companies of Ukraine's National Guard.

Arguments against the supply of weapons, the Wall Street Journal wrote, "look increasingly naïve". Nevertheless, Canadian commentators have pointed to Ukrainian corruption (see here and here) and the presence of "UkrainianNazis" as a way perhaps to justify the Stephen Harper government's decision not to providie military support. High levels of corruption never stopped the supply of Canadian military equipment and special force trainers to Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Putin and the Russian media have repeatedly raised accusations of"fascism" in Ukraine, it is the Russian (rather than the Ukrainian) regime that more closely resembles the political science definition of "fascism".

Nato will not send weapons to Ukraine but the UK, Poland and Canada would follow the US lead. President Obama is fighting against his own Democratic party if he sticks with the position of Chancellor Merkel, who continues to put naïve faith in a peaceful solution.

Economic sanctions (helped by falling oil prices) have not discouraged Putin's reckless and bloody intervention in eastern Ukraine. Some of those advocating military support to Ukraine believe – as in the 1980s through weapons supplied to the Afghan Mujahedeen – that only a growing number of casualties will force realignment in Russian policy to that of public opinion, two thirds of which is against intervention in eastern Ukraine.

The Donbas conflict, engineered and sustained by Moscow, is already Europe's worst security challenge since World War II. There have been 40 close military encountersin the air between Russia and the west since the annexation of the Crimea in March last year. Putin believes he is fighting a "Nato legion" through alleged Ukrainian proxies and has always claimed the Euromaidan revolution was a western-backed coup. Russian soldiers dying at the hands of western weapons would return the world to the Cold War of the 1980s, although it remains unclear which US congressman would today step up as the new Charlie Wilson.

Putin will stop his destabilisation of Ukraine and return to negotiations only when western arms equalise both sides on the battlefield.

Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Centre for Political and Regional Studies, Canadian Institute forUkrainian Studies, University of Alberta and non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Relations, Johns Hopkins University.

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March 27 – Polish prosecutors charged two Russian flight operations officers with involvement in the crash of Tu-154 near Smolensk on April 10th, 2010 (the plane was carrying President Lech Kaczynski), reports Wprost. According to military prosecutor Ireneusz Shelonk, they are accused of creating a situation which resulted in immediate danger as well as inadvertently causing disaster within airspace. Warsaw plans to summon these flight operations officers for questioning as suspects. The airplane, which was carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and another 96 people, crashed, while landing in heavy fog and low visibility at an airfield Smolensk-North. All passengers and crew members died.

March 27 – During the night the militants fired at ATO positions 8 times as well as used heavy artillery – ATO's press center.

March 27 – First Deputy Speaker of Ukrainian Parliament Andriy Parubiy has said that Russia could try to carry out a large-scale invasion in the nearest future in order to have it over and dome with by May 9th, as planned by Putin. "Large number of troops is located close to the border of Ukraine with Russia. Many reports state, and this is no secret, that in the next week there is a high risk of large-scale military operation", – said Parubiy. "The operation must be carried out brilliantly before May 9th, believes Putin, and thus demonstrate the power of the Russian army. Therefore, we need lethal weapons not "when they invade Mariupol" but urgently".

March 27 – Every eight soldier joined the army on his own initiative, voluntarily. The plan of mobilization from January 20th to April 20th of 52,000 army obligated recruits into the Armed Forces of Ukraine has, as of today, been 76% fulfilled, informed at a briefing the Press Secretary of the General Staff, Vladislav Selezniov. According to him, every eight one of this number is a volunteer. Selezniov added that more than half of the plan of mobilizing of transport vehicles – the transfer of automobiles for the uses of the arm – has been fulfilled. Overall, in 2015, it is planned to call up into the army 104,000 individuals within the two mobilization stages. The first phase started on January 20th and will last for 90 days.

March 27 – Premier Arseniy Yatseniuk commissioned to involve European and American investigators in the battle against corruption in Ukraine. "Right now we have a form of the so-called international investigation commission, but I am asking that the Ministry of Internal Affairs to introduce a change in the law, so that we, according to the decision of the investigator, could involve into the carrying out of the investigative actions, professional representatives from the USA and separate EU countries, so that they could help us in the investigation of criminal cases, assist us in tracing the foreign assets and officials, and other people, suspected of corruption," he noted.

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Taras Kuzio: far more Europeans join separatists in Donbas than Isis in Syria:

Taras Kuzio: far more Europeans join separatists in Donbas than Isis in Syria

This week, St Petersburg hosted a bizarre gathering organized by the Rodina (Motherland) party of 150 European fascist and nationalist-populist political parties united in their opposition to the EU and US and in support of Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Rodina is the loyal nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party and consequently plays a similar role to the Radical Party's alliance with the Serbian Socialist party.

Russia's alignment with European fascist and nationalist-populist parties would seem to contradict official rhetoric that has incessantly attacked the Ukrainian Euromaidan leaders as a fascist junta brought to power by western intelligence agencies. It also, as Timothy Snyder of Yale University has pointed, out recalls uncanny memories of the 1939-1941 Soviet-Nazi Pact that also had the goal of dividing European powers.

One sinister outgrowth of Russia's cultivation of extreme right and extreme left parties and movements in Europe is the large mobilisation of people travelling to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to fight for pro-Russian separatists.

There has been understandable outcry over the three young British girls who travelled to Istanbul on February 17 on their way to join Isis, the brutal terrorist organization based in Syria and Iraq. But what has gone unnoticed is the hundreds – far more Europeans than have travelled to join Isis – who have joined Russian-backed terrorists fighting Ukraine's legitimately elected leaders. The BBC reported that the influx of foreign fighters into eastern Ukraine "mirrors that of young Muslims from Britain and other parts of Europe travelling to the Middle East to fight in its wars".

Russian-backed separatists have attracted an eclectic mix of extreme left and extreme right followers, nostalgic in the former case for the USSR and the Spanish civil war and in the latter drawn by a common anti-EU and anti-US platform with Putin and the Donbas separatists. Greeks, traditionally the most pro-Russian nationals in the EU, the Hungarian Legion of St Isztvan, Serbs, French, Germans, Spaniards and volunteers from former Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan are fighting alongside separatists widely condemned by the UN and international human rights groups for crimes against humanity.

The eclectic group has included 20 Frenchmen from the fascist organisation Continental Unity formed in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Serbian war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj. France's far right National Front party has strongly supported Russia's annexation of the Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine and has received a $10 million loan from Russia.

Not surprisingly, there are reportedly over 100 extreme right Serbs fighting for what they see as a common Orthodox religious faith and historic ally. Russian nationalist Igor Girkin "Strelkov" ("Shooter") who commanded Russian special forces in western Donbas until summer of 2014 had fought for the Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s.

One hundred extreme right Germans are fighting alongside the terrorists according to Die Welt. Stephan Mayer, a member of the ruling Christian Democrats, told Die Welt that Germans who participate in civil wars should be taken to court, although presently the German criminal code only punishes those who fight alongside Isis.

The Spanish Republican Guard detained a group of extreme left-wing Spaniards on their return from eastern Ukraine. Angel Davilla-Rivas, one of the Spaniards, has two big tattoos of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin and explained his decision to go to Eastern Ukraine as "gratitude" for Stalin's support for the Spanish Republicans in the 1930s.

British volunteers have not reportedly gone to fight for the Donbas separatists, although the National Front (NF) and UKIP have given their support to Putin, and the NF attended this weeks St Petersburg conference. The Conservative Friends of Russia, renamed the Westminster Russia Forum after a critical in-depthinvestigation by The Guardian, has been functioning as a pro-Kremlin lobby group with extensive support from Sergey Nalobin at the Russian Embassy in London.

British journalist Graham Phillips, who moved from the Conservatives to UKIP, has sent numerous pro-separatist reports for Russian media outlets and was detained on March 4 at Heathrow and questioned for four hours by Border Police under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act about his activities in the Donbas before being released without charge. The British Foreign Office is allegedly pressuring Phillips to halt his reporting from the Donbas.

Phillips does not hide his political sympathies for pro-Russian separatists and does not attempt to be impartial in a conflict zone, posting photos of him wearing lapel badges of Novorossiya (New Russia, the Tsarist term used by Putin and separatists to describe Eastern and Southern Ukraine) and cheering after separatists captured the strategic railway hub of Debaltseve.

Phillips' notoriety came into the public domain late last year when he interviewed Ukrainian prisoners and a wounded Ukrainian soldier. In the interviews, herepeatedly demands the prisoners explain why they have come to "murder civilians" and asks are they "ready to go home now and accept that it is Novorossiya here and not Ukraine". In the second interview Phillips aggressively interviews a severely burnt Ukrainian soldier prisoner.

European law enforcement have been understandably concerned at their citizens travelling to join Isis, yet they have largely ignored the many more far right and far left extremists that are fighting for pro-Russian groups in Ukraine. Recent detentions in Spain and the UK were hesitant, because law enforcement officers still lack political direction as to how to respond to Russia's support for the separatists.

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February 21 – Russian terrorists continue to shell the city of Avdiyivka. Three residents were killed, – informed the Head of Donetsk Regional Department of the Interior Ministry Vyacheslv Abroskin.

February 21 – Security Service of Ukraine has composed a list of over 100 Russian media, whose accreditation has been temporarily withdrawn. Right move, since they are not regular media but KGB.

February 21 – United States and its allies are discussing the possibility of adopting additional sanctions against Russia due to the situation in eastern Ukraine, – said US Secretary of State John Kerry at the meeting with UK Foreign Minister Philip Hammond. We'll be waiting.

February 21 – Pentagon experts have recorded a surge in Russian air activity over Ukraine, stated US Ministry of Defense spokesman Steve Warren.

February 21 – 139 Ukrainian military have just been freed near Luhansk, – informed the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. Hybrid war. It is like we are at war and at the same time we're not.

February 21 – Military actions implemented by Putin against Ukraine, have already cost Russian society and the state 123 billion USD, said the president of the Institute of Economic Analysis Andrei Illarionov at a roundtable meeting in Kyiv.

February 21 – Fighters are increasing their presence in the direction towards Mariupol. Maybe they are readying to attack Mariupol. This was stated by ATO Spokesperson, Andriy Lysenko and transmitted by Interfax-Ukraine.

"In the direction towards Mariupol there is an increasing number of armed artillery, weapons, and live forces of the oponent with the goal of possibly attacking the city of Mariupol," he stated at a briefing on Saturday in Kyiv. He noted that in the last 24 hours the fighters shelled the positions of ATO almost along the whole line of demarcation and conducted an unsuccessful attempt to storm them in the area of Shyrokyne Village. "During the last 24 hours, the fighters continued to shoot the positions of the ATO forces practically along the whole stretch of the line of demarcation," he stated. According to Lysenko, particularly intense remain the armed provocations from the side of the fighters in the Yasynuvatskyj area of the Donetsk region. "This is around the villages of Pisky, Doslidne, Vodiane, and Tonenke. In doing this, they actively utilize mines as well as reactive artillery of fire volleys and tanks," explained the ATO Spokesperson and also noted that there are continued provocations in the area of Shyrokyne Village. "Fighters with mines, grenades, and rifles, attacked the positions of ATO forces 10 times and were unsuccessful in storming it," reported Lysenko. Also the lietenant informed that the forces of ATO in the Debaltsev direction, are regrouping and are consolidating on new defensive positions. ATO Speaker provided information that in the Luhansk region,"Russian-terrorist groupings exhibited activity and attacked from the reactive systems of the gun volley 'Hrad' the area of the city of Popasne and the strong point of our soldiers and actually the city." Also, he informed, that in the last 24 hours, there were traced 16 enemy BPLA flights directed toward Mariupol, Donetsk, and Luhansk. "We note that most of the unmanned flights appear in the skies within 30 minutes after shooting has ceased," added Lysenko.

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