Finnish news agency STT reports a Russian border guard’s confession that the transport of asylum seekers to Finland’s two northeast border crossings is being orchestrated by the Russian Federation’s Federal Security Service, the FSB.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/russian_border_guard_to_stt_russian_security_service_behind_northeast_asylum_traffic/8620174

Footage, interviews from Ukraine’s front line.

(Taping grenades and ammunition to RPGs seems like the idiotic pseudo science much more prevalent here in the east.)

In case you missed it:

Nearly a decade later, an exhaustive inquiry by a British judge concluded on Thursday that the dying former KGB operative was probably right. For the first time, the Russian president was officially implicated in a murder that seemed plucked from the pages of a Cold War spy novel but actually played out in the bar of a posh hotel in 21st-century London.

The victim: an outspoken Kremlin critic who had defected to Britain, joined the payroll of British intelligence and accused Putin of vices­ including corruption and pedophilia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/putin-implicated-in-fatal-poisoning-of-former-kgb-spy-at-posh-london-hotel/2016/01/21/2c0c5052-bf92-11e5-98c8-7fab78677d51_story.html

This is what right looks like. Ukrainian fighter to his government:

“If you pull us back under the yoke, you will be executed.”

http://videochart.net/video/77386.78344218bcef98e6d01d07ce7208

https://medium.com/@dumitruciorici/explanation-what-happens-in-moldova-9ca3d94d36ca

“The evolution of Kyiv’s position on the Transnistrian settlement has also been featured by delaying of appointment of the new political representative of the Ukrainian side in the negotiations in the “5+2″ format since May 2015. The concern is also raised by the fact that not a single meeting has been held within the negotiation process in 2015,” Karasin said. . . .

According to Grigory Karasin, the tension may escalate “after the implementation of plans of Moldova and Ukraine on the organization of the joint customs and border control in relation to Transnistria”.

“In particular, this means that the decision of the Ukrainian and Moldovan parties will change the procedure of delivery of goods imported in Transnistria from Jan. 1, 2016. According to Tiraspol, the additional tax burden on the Transnistrian enterprises will exceed $4 million,” Deputy Foreign Minister said.

http://en.censor.net.ua/n367729

Genuine war refugees fleeing the conflict in the Ukraine have been denied asylum in Germany in 95 percent of cases (and will, from now on, all be refused that status)—while Angela Merkel’s government admits hundreds of thousands of “war refugees” from all over the nonwhite Middle East without question.

The blatant double standard in favoring nonwhite “war refugees” over whites definitively reveals that the real purpose of Merkel’s policy is not to “help asylum seekers,” but to replace Europeans as quickly as possible.

According to the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, of the more than 7,000 Ukrainians who applied for asylum in 2014 and 2015, only 5 percent have been granted that status, and all the rest will be sent back to the Ukraine—even though there has been a full-scale war there since April 2014.

The Frankfurter Rundschau said that many of the refugees come directly from the Donbass region war zone, where their houses and livelihoods have been destroyed—identical to the claims made by the “Syrians” currently pouring into Germany.

http://newobserveronline.com/white-war-refugees-not-allowed-in-germany/

Small victory in Ukraine’s generally disappointing battle against corruption.

Need to execute a few corrupt politicians. Just one or two. The others will get the message. They are, first and foremost, cowards.

A little over a month after US Vice President Joe Biden told Ukrainian legislators that graft was eating Ukraine “like a cancer,” an order from Ukraine’s cabinet of ministers struck a decisive blow against pharmaceutical corruption. This order outsources the purchasing of numerous medicines for seriously ill Ukrainians from the Ministry of Health to respected international organizations including UNICEF, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and Crown Agents.

The saga of drug procurement nicely illustrates both the resistance reformers face, as well as the creative methods they have used to overcome entrenched interests. According to Olga Stefanyshyna, executive director of the NGO Patients of Ukraine, the Ministry of Health was previously in charge of a $250 million budget for purchasing medicine—$100 million of which was allegedly stolen by corrupt officials.

As a 2013 report from the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AnTAC) demonstrates, corrupt actors have employed a variety of creative strategies to enrich themselves. In one scheme, a small number of companies and government officials arranged staged tenders with the winner determined in advance. In another, several companies controlled by one owner “compete” in the tenders. Using this technique, the Bahriy Group won over $12 million in state contracts to supply HIV and tuberculosis drugs at inflated prices to the Ministry of Health in 2013.

Oleksandra Ustinova, an AnTAC board member, said reformers faced enormous challenges combatting Ukraine’s “pharmaceutical mafia” and corrupt Ministry of Health officials. “Even when we closed one corrupt hole within the Ministry, corrupt officials would come up with another one. Given the amounts of money at stake, AnTAC and our allies realized we needed to find a way to bypass the Ministry entirely.”

A few years ago, Ustinova and her colleagues discovered the Dutch IDA Foundation which oversees drug procurement for other countries, “so even before the Maidan, we dreamt of bringing a third party into the market and IDA provided an ideal model. After the Revolution, this became the number one priority.”

After a month of lobbying, AnTAC and Patients of Ukraine succeeded in forcing a bill through parliament stripping drug procurement responsibilities from the Ministry of Health on March 19, 2015. It wasn’t easy. According to Ustinova, the Ministry and its allies registered seven alternative bills in parliament hoping to confuse lawmakers and stymie reforms, requiring Ustinova and parliamentary allies to work overtime to ensure the right law was passed.

As is frequently the case in Ukraine, however, the law’s passage was just the first step in the reform effort. “Despite the passage of the law, the Ministry of Health ignored it. They were supposed to develop and approve the procedural regulations and begin communications with international organizations to implement the law. Instead, they sat on their hands and did nothing,” Stefanyshyna said in a January 18 interview.

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/how-ukraine-s-reformers-beat-the-pharma-mafia

According to Israel’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Israel opposes sanctions against Russia, arguing that they are not an effective tool for resolving the conflict in the Donbas. Ever since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Israel has attempted to maintain a “neutral” posture in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Israeli diplomats were not present during the March 2014 vote on the US-supported UN resolution condemning Russia for its annexation of Crimea. Later, Israel blocked a sale to Ukraine of Israeli-manufactured drones to monitor ceasefire compliance by the Russian-separatist forces in the Donbas. However, according to several media reports, Israel sold a number of intelligence-gathering drones to Russia late last year.

http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/01/19/88069/

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-12/how-ukraine-weaned-itself-off-russian-gas

Almost twenty years after Ukraine promised to reform its prosecutor’s office as a condition to joining the Council of Europe, it still has a long way to go. The reforms that have been made were disturbingly cosmetic. Shokin sabotaged the latest round of reform, which resulted in the status quo being reinstated under the guise of a new competitive system.

Under former President Viktor Yanukovych, the prosecutor’s office was seriously compromised. As a result, public faith in law enforcement remains critically low. Post-Maidan expectations of real reform received a setback when President Petro Poroshenko appointed Shokin, who is widely viewed as part of the old guard. That concern has proven justified.

Parliament adopted a new law that would radically reform the prosecutor’s system on October 14, 2014. It should have come into force on April 25, 2015, but all of its provisions have been deferred until April 15, 2016, as the result of behind-the-scenes lobbying. The first stages of vital restructuring did, however, begin: local prosecutors were supposed to be hired through a competitive system that would bring in an influx of external candidates. Initially, sixty percent of those candidates were outsiders, but that number dropped to 22 percent after two phases of independent tests.

But the real problem was with the selection committee. Four members of the commission were Shokin’s representatives and three were from parliament. After the selection commission had finished interviewing candidates, only 3 percent of the successful candidates were outsiders.

And then all outsiders disappeared, courtesy of the prosecutor general, who had the final say.

http://uaposition.com/analysis-opinion/ukraines-prosecutor-general-sabotaged-reform-process/