Moscow accuses Kyiv (via Sputnik) of violating the Minsk cease-fire deal by allowing U.S. troops into the country to train Ukrainians (U.K. troops have been there, too).
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk speaking to his cabinet yesterday on the Victory Day controversy and St. George ribbons, the symbol of Soviet valor in WWII that took on new political dimensions after Russian troops occupied Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last year:
"I want to remind you once more that the symbol of the commemoration [of the victory in World War II] is a poppy, it is a European symbol. Let all the other ribbons be worn by the Russian Federation, which for whatever reason claims it was Russia that won the Second World War.”
“Ukraine is a victor country, and Ukraine will commemorate the end of World War II and its victory over the Nazis."
Russia has jailed a Crimean historian to seven years in jail, our Russian Service reports:
A historian from Crimea, Oleksiy Chyrniy, has been sentenced to seven years in jail in Russia on terrorism charges.
Russia's North Caucasus District Court on April 21 found Chyrniy guilty of planning several terrorist acts in Crimea's capital, Simferopol, and sentenced him the same day.
Chyrniy, who made a deal with investigators, pleaded guilty.
Chyrniy, along with Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov and activists Oleksandr Kolchenko and Hennadiy Afanasyev, was arrested in Crimea in May 2014, weeks after Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine via a controversial referendum.
Afanasyev, who also pleaded guilty and made a deal with investigators, was sentenced to seven years in jail in December.
Sentsov and Kolchenko are currently in a Moscow pretrial detention center awaiting trial. They deny any wrongdoings.
If found guilty, they may face up to 20 years in jail.
Here's today's map of the security situation, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
Ukrainian prosecutors have said the deadly fire in the southern port city of Odesa last May was not pre-planned.
Following an official investigation Ukrainian prosecutors said there was no evidence that the fire which killed dozens of Russian-backed militants in the House of Trade Unions was premeditated.
Most of the victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The initial version that a toxic substance, chloroform, had been brought to the building before it was set on fire was not proven.
On May 2, 2014, 48 people were killed and 247 others injured in a blaze that broke out in a Trade Union building in central Odesa after clashes between football fans supporting the current authorities and anti-government activists.
The murder of Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzyna, shot dead outside his home on April 16, has proved fodder for numerous social-media discussions and speculations and conspiracy web sites.
A story that began to emerge after his death was a claim that Peacekeeper (Mirotvorets), a Ukrainian web site that tracks cases of suspected "pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers" had in fact uploaded his profile two days before his death, and even added his home address and phone number, which had not been previously published before his death.
LiveLeak and many others maintained that the dating of the entries before the murder constituted proof that the website was involved in the murders.
The same claim was made about an entry for Oleh Kalashnikov, a former parliamentary member who had been shot dead the previous day on April 15 as he returned home to his apartment.
But as Peacekeeper explained in a post on their site on April 17, the entire thing was apparently a deliberate hoax -- a honey-trap for conspiracy theorists.