Top rated Ukraine T-Shirts online unity shopping? Dutch authorities made a surprise announcement Thursday that they had refused entry to a Russian spy posing as a Brazilian national to infiltrate the International Criminal Court. Authorities speculated that the man was seeking to gain access to information relating to the ICC’s investigations of alleged Russian war crimes. The alleged spy “was sent back to Brazil on the first flight out,” authorities said of the events, which took place in April. But the trail of deceit apparently went much further back. Social media accounts belonging to the alleged spy suggest that he had studied at top academic institutions in Europe and the United States – including Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., a key place of study for future foreign policy elites. Discover more Ukraine solidarity details on Ukraine Sticker.
February 2015: The Minsk group meets again in Belarus to find a more successful agreement to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, resulting in the Minsk II agreement. It too has been unsuccessful at ending the violence. From 2014 through today, more than 14,000 people have been killed, tens of thousands wounded and more than a million displaced. Together, the annexation of Crimea and the Russian-backed violence in the east have pushed Ukrainian public sentiment toward the West, strengthening interest in joining NATO and the EU. 2016 and 2017: As fighting in the Donbas continues, Russia repeatedly strikes at Ukraine in a series of cyberattacks, including a 2016 attack on Kyiv’s power grid that causes a major blackout. In 2017, a large-scale assault affects key Ukrainian infrastructure, including the National Bank of Ukraine and the country’s electrical grid. (Cyberattacks from Russia have continued through the present; the latest major attack targeted government websites in January 2022.)
March 26: During a visit to US troops in Poland, Biden appears to suggest regime change in Moscow. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden says of Putin. Biden backpedals on the remark the following day. March 29: Russian and Ukrainian negotiators meet in Istanbul. Ukraine puts forward a detailed proposal of neutrality. April 1: An Al Jazeera report reveals that Russia is using proxy groups in Syria to recruit fighters for Ukraine. April 2: As Russian troops withdraw from Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv, dozens of corpses in civilian clothes are found on the streets.
Why Luhansk and Donetsk are key to understanding the latest escalation in Ukraine? But along the country’s eastern border with Russia, separatists backed by Moscow took control of two regions in 2014. Violence in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 14,000 people in the years since, according to International Crisis Group research. Russia’s recognition of the two regions’ independence set the stage for moving its troops into Ukraine. Anti-communist protests sweep central and Eastern Europe, starting in Poland and spreading throughout the Soviet bloc. In Ukraine, January 1990 sees more than 400,000 people joining hands in a human chain stretching some 400 miles from the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk to Kyiv, the capital, in the north-central part of Ukraine. Many wave the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag that had been banned under Soviet rule.
Here is a timeline of the developments: February 21: Russian President Vladimir Putin orders troops into the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and recognises them as independent states. February 22: The Russian parliament authorises Putin to use military force. The United States places full blocking sanctions on the Kremlin-controlled VEB bank and PSB bank. Germany immediately halts the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. February 23: The European Union freezes the assets of 351 Duma members. Discover more Ukraine relief info at Ukraine T-Shirts.