Ukraine Updates

Our Love and Support for Ukraine:

This is worse than a stalemate: for all the attempts to reach a settlement, Ukraine is still in real danger of slipping back into violence.

The three-year-old ceasefire is already being violated almost daily. More than 2m people continue to suffer forced displacement within Ukraine and beyond the country’s borders, especially in Russia; the constitutional and institutional reform project supposed to resolve the country’s problems remains mired in a morass of corruption, poor transparency and popular disillusionment.

To add to the complexity, the two sides in Ukraine are internally fragmented. The eastern separatists are not one uniform force, as became obvious in an abortive coupin Luhansk in November 2017. Nor do political elites in Kyiv see eye-to-eye on how to deal with the conflict. At the moment, those who want to cut off the two separatist-controlled and arguably Russian-occupied territories in eastern Ukraine seem to have the upper hand. This is particularly evident from the passage of Law No. 7163 by the Ukrainian parliament on January 18, 2018, which fails to live up, by ommission, to Ukraine’s international obligations under the fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

And on top of all this, there are plenty of outside forces at work.