-- The UN General Assembly has passed a resolution that affirms Ukraine's territorial integrity.
-- The IMF has announced "a staff-level agreement" with Kyiv on assistance of $14 billion-$18 billion in conjunction with a reform program that will "unlock" up to $27 billion over the next two years, pending final approval next month. Tthe U.S. Congress has also passed an aid bill for Ukraine.
-- Ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko has announced plans to run for president.
-- Members of the Right Sector have been holding a demonstration outside the Ukrainian parliament building to vent their anger at the killing of prominent member Oleksander Muzychkoearlier in the week.
-- Six Ukrainian military officers detained by pro-Russian troops in Crimea have been released, including Colonel Yuliy Mamchur, but five others are still being held captive.
-- Anonymous sources quoted by CNN say U.S. intelligence "concludes it is more likely than previously thought that Russian forces will enter eastern Ukraine."
-- U.S. President Barack Obama, in the keynote speech of his visit to Europe, chided Russia for its use of "brute force" in Ukraine and vowed that a determined alliance of the United States and Europe will prevail over time.
*NOTE: Times are stated according to local time in Kyiv
Sea of flowers in Kyiv today to honor victims of the country's unrest:
16:387.3.2014
New York University professor, and frequent guest on RFE/RL's Power Vertical Podcast, Mark Galeotti takes a look at Crimea's new de facto leader Sergei Aksyonov and his alleged ties with organized crime.
"While Moscow may be willing to take over the billions in dollars of subsidies which keeps it afloat, there will be pressure for new revenue streams, and also opportunities created by being in a hazy grey zone between Russia and Ukraine. Even if Russia annexes the region formally, it will presumably have to work through the local elites and law-enforcement structures, agents who have too often proven self-interested, under-controlled and over-acquisitive in the past. The scope for a new “free crime zone”—regardless of Aksyonov’s backstory—is depressingly extensive."
16:307.3.2014
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (and UDAR head Vitali Klitschko) were also at the European People's Party meeting in Dublin today.
Tymoshenko said: "Putin will go as far as the Western world will allow him to."
"If we allow Russia to hold a referendum under the barrel of Kalashnikovs on the annexation of Crimea, we will lose stability throughout the whole world," she said.
But there have been numerous reports in recent days that Western economic and political elites find their relations with Russia too lucrative to put on the block. Here's one by Oliver Bullough: "Russia's Elite Are London's Cash Cows."
16:137.3.2014
We've been waiting for an English-language piece that uses the Crimea crisis to remind of us of Vasily Aksyonov's classic dystopian novel "The Island Of Crimea." The Carnegie Endowment's Thomas de Waal serves it up.
"First published in 1979, Vasily Aksyonov’s fantasy imagines that Crimea is an island, not a peninsula, that had survived as a White Russian enclave after the 1917 Bolshevik takeover and then grown into a sort of Russian Taiwan, booming, decadent and crammed full with all the luxuries that Brezhnev-era Russians craved. It ends with a war, as mainland Russia invades and the anomalous experiment comes to an end."
16:057.3.2014
16:047.3.2014
There was a massive rally in Moscow today in support of President Vladimir Putin's policies in Ukraine. The main slogan of the demonstration was "We Trust Putin In Everything."
16:017.3.2014
"USA Today" reports on a U.S. Pentagon program called "Body Leads" that " uses the principles of movement pattern analysis to predict how leaders will act."
The Pentagon "has backed the work of Brenda Connors, the director of Body Leads and a research fellow at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., since 1996, records show, and has paid about $300,000 since 2009 to outside experts to work with her. Part of her work includes a 2008 report for ONA on Putin called 'Movement, The Brain and Decision-making, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.'"
"While Connors declined to characterize her current work, she has written previously about Putin's movements, including what she identified as an irregularity in the way he walks. In a 2005 interview in The Atlantic magazine, she said Putin's physical problems 'created a strong will that he survive and an impetus to balance and strengthen the body. ... When we are unable to do something, really hard work becomes the way.'"
