April 12:
Pro-Russian forces have begun to take over parts of Ukraine in what many fear represents a prelude to an all-out Russian invasion. London’s Telegraph reports that masked gunmen, believed to include soldiers and military professionals, have taken over government buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk. Meanwhile, in nearby Donetsk, hundreds of pro-Russian protestors have taken control of the regional police headquarters.
April 13:
More than 10,000 protesters have taken to the street in Moscow in opposition to the Kremlin’s state news coverage, the Associated Press reports. The so-called “March of Truth” was organized largely in objection to Russian state media’s spin on events in Ukraine, where the new government has been depicted by Russian television as a “military junta.”
While global procurement of arms declined over the past year, Russia has headed in the opposite direction. TheAssociated Press, citing new data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, reports that Russian military spending increased by nearly 5 percent in 2013, at a time when overall global spending on arms fell by nearly 2 percent. Last year, the think tank noted, Russia spent nearly $88 billion on weapons, equivalent to 4.1 percent of its GDP.
Is Russia on the cusp of a new culture war? An expose in the Moscow Times details a number of alarming similarities between current events and the dark period of the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet Russia – when artists, playwrights and authors were discredited and then jailed, even killed, for their beliefs. Among the signs, the paper reports, is the draft “Foundation of State Cultural Politics” recently released by the country’s Interior Ministry – which declares that art which does not “contain spiritual and moral content, or which exerts a negative influence on society” should not be supported by the government, and the state should consider acts to “suppress negative impact on the public consciousness.”
April 14:
Amid mounting concern in Washington over a purported $20 billion oil barter deal between Moscow and Tehran, a senior Kremlin official has said that the Russian government doesn’t see itself as bound by U.S. economic sanctions and has no cause to limit its economic contacts with the Islamic Republic. “We are having conversations with Iran on trade and economic relations. They have not been completed. We don't see reasons why we should give up the development of economic relations with Iran. We are not violating any international sanctions by such actions,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vasili Nebenzya said in comments carried by Iran’s PressTV.
The Hill reports that two Russian fighter jets made ‘provocative” moves near a U.S. Navy destroyer docked in the western Black Sea. According to a Pentagon spokesman, one of the Russian jets made “numerous close-range, low-altitude passes” near the USS Donald Cook and did not respond to hailing calls by the U.S. destroyer.
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