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Moscow Court Upholds Extending Pretrial Detention Of Ukrainian Sailors
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WATCH: Moscow Court Upholds Extending Pretrial Detention Of Ukrainian Sailors

Live Blog: A New Government In Ukraine (Archive Sept. 3, 2018-Aug. 16, 2019)

-- EDITOR'S NOTE: We have started a new Ukraine Live Blog as of August 17, 2019. You can find it here.

-- A court in Moscow has upheld a lower court's decision to extend pretrial detention for six of the 24 Ukrainian sailors detained by Russian forces along with their three naval vessels in November near the Kerch Strait, which links the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.

-- The U.S. special peace envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, says Russian propaganda is making it a challenge to solve the conflict in the east of the country.

-- Two more executives of DTEK, Ukraine's largest private power and coal producer, have been charged in a criminal case on August 14 involving an alleged conspiracy to fix electricity prices with the state energy regulator, Interfax reported.

-- A Ukrainian deputy minister and his aide have been detained after allegedly taking a bribe worth $480,000, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau said on Facebook.

*Time stamps on the blog refer to local time in Ukraine

19:05 9.3.2019

Here's more, including a dramatic video, from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service on the clashes in Kyiv today:

Police, Far-Right Protesters Clash In Kyiv

Far-Right Protesters Clash With Police In Kyiv
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Police and far-right demonstrators have clashed outside the presidential administration building in the Ukrainian capital.

The far-right activists had gathered in Kyiv on March 9 to call for arrests of figures linked to an alleged military corruption scandal.

A media investigation last week detailed purported embezzlement schemes in Ukraine's military industry, including the involvement of a factory controlled by President Petro Poroshenko.

Video showed demonstrators trying to break through police lines, shoving officers and setting off fireworks. Police used tear gas to turn them back.

In a statement, police said one officer was hospitalized with chemical burns to his eyes.

The investigation on media outlet Bihus.Info's program Nashi Hroshi alleged that Ihor Hladkovskyy, the son of close Poroshenko ally Oleh Hladkovskyy, who is deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, organized a ring to smuggle spare military-equipment parts from Russia in 2015, a year after Moscow seized Ukraine's Crimea region and threw its support behind militant separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The report alleged that state defense facilities purchased the smuggled spare parts from private companies linked to Ihor Hladkovskyy and his friends at highly inflated prices.

It claimed that Ukroboronprom, the state concern that supervises defense industry production facilities, knew the origin of the smuggled parts but agreed to buy them.

The report also alleged that Ihor Hladkovskyy and his two associates illegally earned at least 250 million hryvnyas ($9.2 million) by smuggling the items from Russia through three major private firms, one of which belonged to Poroshenko at the time.

A day after the investigative report was broadcast on YouTube on February 25, Poroshenko suspended Oleh Hladkovskyy from his post and two days later announced that a probe had been launched into the allegations. On March 4, Poroshenko fired Hladkovskyy.

The election comes amid persistent economic challenges in the country and an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine against Russia-backed separatists.

The latest survey conducted by the nongovernmental Rating Groups showed that 41-year-old comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy leads the election race with the support of 25.1 percent of voters. Poroshenko had 16.6 percent support, followed by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 16.2 percent.

With reporting by AP
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16:39 9.3.2019

We'll now point you in the direction of a new feature by Alexander Gogun and Pete Baumgartner.

Bandera Beef? In Germany, Hip-Hop Opera Courts Ukrainian Controversy

Stepan Bandera is revered as a hero by many Ukrainians, but considered a war criminal and an anti-Semitic murderer by others.
Stepan Bandera is revered as a hero by many Ukrainians, but considered a war criminal and an anti-Semitic murderer by others.

​A Ukrainian-born musician is using the rapid-fire verse of hip-hop to put the complicated legacy of Stepan Bandera -- the variously beloved and reviled World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist leader -- in a different perspective.

Inspired by the blockbuster American rap musical Hamilton, Berlin-based composer/musician Yuriy Gurzhy said "everyone laughed" at him when he first broached the idea of staging what he calls a "hiphopera" about the highly contentious Bandera.

But Gurzhy and a rapt audience of hundreds had the last laugh when the show, Bandera, debuted at the innovative Maxim Gorki Theater in the German capital late last year and continued its run through mid-February.

The whole opera appeared aimed at aspects of an admittedly reductive question: Stepan Bandera, hero or monster?

Read more here.

16:32 9.3.2019

Like her French counterpart (see below), the U.K. ambassador to Kyiv has also been having a bash at Taras Shevchenko's poetry:

16:19 9.3.2019

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