Excerpts from the most important news on Ukraine
EBRD invested more than €1 bln in Ukrainian projects last year
17.01.2020
EBRD invested €1.1 billion in 51 Ukraine projects last year. Of the 38 countries where the development of bank loans money, Ukraine was second only to Egypt for the volume of investments and first for the number of projects.In Ukraine, 62% of the loans, or €680 million, were for ‘green’ projects, Anton Usov, the regional spokesman for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, writes on Facebook.Investments went to a variety of sectors: solar, wind, electricity transmission, pharmaceutical, agricultural, ...Google opened R&D office in Kyiv
17.01.2020
Google Ukraine opened an R&D office in Kyiv this month, becoming the third Google Eastern Europe office to have R&D, after Google Poland and Google Hungary. In Ukraine, Google acquired CloudSimple in November and recently integrated the 30 employees into the Google structure, reports AIN.UA, the IT news site.An outgrowth of Ciklum, CloudSimple develops ‘VMware’ – software that allows users to create virtual machines on physical servers and to migrate them to the cloud. The Kyiv office is located in Astarta ...The number of Ukrainians traveling internationally by airplane jumped by 30%
15.01.2020
The number of Ukrainians traveling internationally by airplane jumped by 30% last year, to 15.1 million, reports Ukraine’s Border Guard Service.By contrast, land crossings of Ukraine’s border with its four EU neighbors were flat – 36.7 million people of all nationalities. And land crossings on the russia-Ukraine border – by all nationalities – were down by 10% to 10 million.Commercial air flights between russia and Ukraine stopped four years ago. Further underlining the EU allure, the numbers of ...China’s Commodity Exchange has acquired a 49.9% stake in PFTS
15.01.2020
China’s Bohai Commodity Exchange has acquired a 49.9% stake in PFTS Stock Exchange, Ukraine’s second-largest exchange, after Perspective. Last year, PFTS handled $3.2 billion in trades, 38% of the volume on Ukraine’s three exchanges.Two years ago, the Tianjin-based exchange, known as BOCE, purchased the Ukrainian Bank for Reconstruction and Development.russian billionaire is suing banks for refusing to do business with him
14.01.2020
russian billionaire Boris Rotenberg is suing four Nordic banks for not doing business with him, Bloomberg reports.The oligarch, an associate of President Vladimir putin, is on the U.S. sanctions list. But Rotenberg says his status as a dual citizen of both russia and Finland means banks based in Europe must process his transactions.The banks in question — Svenska Handelsbanken AB, Nordea Bank Abp, OP Group and Danske Bank A/S — disagree. The concern is that they risk losing access to ...Ukraine’s only English-language television channel has stopped broadcasting
14.01.2020
“Ukrainian international state broadcaster UATV will cease the production of news and satellite broadcasting, starting from January 13, 2020,” UATV said in a news release.Former CEO of the TV channel Lyudmila Berezovska said that the reason for her dismissal was a “different understanding of the prospects for the development of Ukrainian foreign broadcaster.”UATV was created in 2015 amid what media analysts have called a fierce “information war” with russia. The channel was established “to ensure access of foreign audiences to ...Ukraine accounts for more than 50% of annual EU agri-food import growth
12.01.2020
For the year 12-month period from November 2018 to October 2019, agri-food imports from third countries accounted for EUR 119.7 billion, ec.europa.eu reports.The most important origins for EU agri-food imports over the past 12 months (EUR billion) were the USA (12.3), Brazil (11.7), followed by Ukraine (7.3) and China (6.2).On a year-on-year basis, the value of agri-food imports (in EUR billion, % change) continued to grow impressively from Ukraine (+2.1, +41%), which accounted for more half of total import ...Court orders russia to pay damages to Ukrainian firms
12.01.2020
The Swiss Federal Court has ordered russia to pay $82.1 million in damages to 12 Ukrainian firms confiscated after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, swissinfo.ch reports.In two decisions published on Thursday, the court rejected the appeals of the russian state against the rulings made in a Geneva court last April.russia claimed that the Geneva body was not fit to rule on the case, since doing so amounted to making a de facto ruling on the status of Crimea. It also ...Kyiv is a Capital of “Modernity”
10.01.2020
Throughout its long history Kyiv experienced many ups and downs, from the early tenth century, when it was the capital of the Kyivan Principality, to our own times, when it became the capital of an independent Ukrainian state, writes historian Jean-Claude Marcadé for Harvard Ukrainian Studies.It was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that the “gubernatorial center” of Kyiv once again began to play a role more prominent than that of a provincial capital. Between 1884 and ...Prisoner swap lifts veil on russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine
10.01.2020
The true significance of the latest prisoner exchange between Ukraine and the russian-occupied Donbas may lie in the identities of the prisoners demanded by the kremlin, reads a piece by Adrian Karatnycky published on the Atlantic Council website.By insisting on the release of figures unconnected to the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, russia has tacitly admitted its involvement in the coordination of terrorist acts and other forms of hybrid warfare across Ukraine. Technically, the prisoner exchange occurred between the Ukrainian ...russia demanded the release of a ‘Ukrainian fascist’ as part of the prisoner exchange in occupied Donbas
10.01.2020
While russia’s insistence on the inclusion of a crucial MH17 witness, suspected Maidan killers and convicted terrorists in the last two prisoner exchanges gained warranted attention, the inclusion of Edward Kovalenko in the last exchange of prisoners in occupied Donbas was also highly telling, writes Halya Coynash for khpg.org.russia has constantly demonized all Ukrainian nationalist organizations as ‘fascist’, so why, you might ask, would it demand that Ukraine release the former leader of one of the most notorious of such organizations? The answer, in ...russian Academic Journals Retract Hundreds Papers After Plagiarism Probe
10.01.2020
russian academic journals have retracted more than 850 papers after an Academy of Sciences commission probe into questionable publication practices, the commission said this week, The moscow Times reports.The commission had asked 541 journals last year to retract 2,528 academic articles suspected of unethical publication practices. These include plagiarism, self-plagiarism or “obscure authorship.”The commission also urged for the removal of five journals, including one defunct publication, from the russian scientific electronic library’s database that contains more than 6,000 russian ...
