New Levada Center poll shows a 20-year high in anti-Western sentiment among Russians, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports. Some 74 percent of respondents regard relations with the United States as "mostly bad" or "very bad," compared with 60 percent vis-a-vis Europe.
Russians' views of Ukrainians are also suffering, with around 55 percent viewing them negatively. About two-thirds of respondents thought Ukrainian authorities were to blame for worsening relations, and just 8 percent thought the blame falls equally on both sides.
AFP quotes the city council in separatist-held Donetsk as saying that there were no casualties in an overnight air strike on that city.
From ITAR-TASS:
Russia's Airborne Forces (VDV) personnel is planned to be doubled - up to 72,000 troops, a source in the Russian General Staff said on Wednesday.
According to the high-ranking official, these plans are to be implemented in 2019.
The head of the Dutch MH17 recovery mission, Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, said in his daily report posted on the Dutch government's official website that investigators have finished their search for remains, belongings, and debris yesterday at one part of the site:
The experts searched a large area near the village of Roszypne. The work had to be stopped temporarily due to negotiations being conducted by the OSCE. A smaller group of experts was able to work undisturbed for the rest of the afternoon. The search in this area is now completed.
From Ukraine's foreign ministry following the UN Security Council debate yesterday:
Leonid Bershidsky via Bloomberg View on "The Vladimir Putin School Of Leadership" argues that:
The leaders of some of the biggest developing nations -- China, India, Turkey, South Africa -- are increasingly acting like Russian President Vladimir Putin. It may be that democracy as the West understands it will have to compete with a new strain of authoritarianism, much as it did with communism in Soviet times.
And the nub of it:
These are not the characteristics of a smattering of rogue regimes. This is how the world's populous nations, with all their emerging economic and geopolitical clout, are governed. The Western version of democracy had a chance to spread after communism fell in the 1990s, but it has failed to take root where the world's untapped economic potential is concentrated. The West squandered its opportunity by cynical and self-serving interference in the emerging world's affairs. It botched democracy's marketing campaign: While democratic values themselves are hard to tarnish, the politicians who put themselves forward as their champions did not live up to the task.