Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka expressed relief that sanctions against Russia so far are "aimed at a limited number of areas" but warned in a statement quoted from by Reuters, "Neither for the European Union, nor for Russia, is it favorable to get into a drawn-out trade war and that some new economic and political Iron Curtain appears on Ukraine's eastern border."
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov says Ukraine "is flatly denying assistance to Moscow in delivering humanitarian aid to Lugansk and Donetsk where the situation is sliding into a humanitarian disaster," in the words of ITAR-TASS.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has published a commentary on its official website warning that the latest U.S. sanctions "will only bring the further complication of Russian-American relations" and create "an extremely unfavorable backdrop in international affairs." It accuses the White House of "covering the bloody military operation of Kyiv" and operating with the "sole aim [of] getting even with us for policies that are "independent and uncomfortable for Washington."
The BBC has a short report about how U.S. actor David Duchovny has become a Russian symbol, even as he learned that his background wasn't Russian, but Ukrainian. Watch here.
To read about the recent history of tensions in Crimea over the right to land, read Robert Coalson's In Crimea, A Simmering Cauldron from earlier this year.
ITAR-TASS has quoted a Russian minister as saying Russian would build its own aircraft carrier if France canceled the billion-dollar Mistral deal, and it would be better.
Russia will build an aircraft carrier on its own if France annuls the supplies of Mistral helicopter carriers, Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Wednesday as he answered a question from Itar-Tass.
He said the Russian ship would be better than the Mistral because it would be ice-strengthened and would be capable of operations in Arctic seas.
"I don't think the renunciation (of supplies of the Mistrals) is highly beneficial for the French President and will cause a big crisis at the shipyard that is building these ships," Rogozin said. "Also, the French will have to pay a penalty as all these things are mentioned in the contract.
"When we were placing the orders for these ships we didn't have a technology of large-size assembly then but now we have gotten it," Rogozin said.
By handing over an aircraft carrier to India last year "we demonstrated the ability to build such ships, all the more so that now we have shipyards with dry docks in Crimea and they presuppose ability to build ships of this class, he said.
The latest update from the OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine: