Russia begins handing out passports to Ukrainians from conflict zone:
By RFE/RL
Russia has begun handing out Russian passports to Ukrainians from separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, a move condemned by Kyiv as "legally void."
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to simplify the process for Ukrainian citizens in the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions to get Russian citizenship just days after Volodomyr Zelenskiy won the country's presidential runoff on April 21. The move was slammed in Ukraine and abroad as an attempt to undermine Zelenskiy.
According to Russian state media, more than 60 Ukrainians from Donetsk and Luhansk were reportedly handed Russian passports at a ceremony in Russia's Rostov region on June 14.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said the Russian move won't "have any legal consequences and won't be recognized by the Ukrainian side and the world," a statement quoted by Ukrainian media said.
Ukraine has threatened to revoke the citizenship of those who accept Russian passports through the program.
Earlier this week, the European Union threatened that it would not recognize Russian passports obtained through what it denounced as an illegal method.
Giving Russian citizenship en masse to people in Ukrainian regions "runs counter to the spirit and the objectives" of the cease-fire commitments, the EU said in a statement.
Russia's Interior Ministry has received 12,000 passport applications under the program in the Rostov region, the state-run TASS news agency reported.
Zelenskiy has mocked the passport offer, telling Ukrainians not to bother since Russian citizenship means "the right to be arrested for peaceful protests," and "the right not to have free and competitive elections."
Russia-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions for the past five years.
Some 13,000 people have been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by the United Nations. (w/112.international, dpa, and TASS)
Brussels to drop criticism of controversial education law:
By Rikard Jozwiak
BRUSSELS -- A draft statement expected to be issued at an upcoming EU-Ukraine summit will express Brussels' continued recognition of Ukraine's European aspirations while dropping criticism of the country's education law, according to a copy of the draft seen by RFE/RL.
The statement, which was approved by EU ambassadors on June 13 and subsequently sent to Kyiv for further remarks, says that "we acknowledged the European aspirations of Ukraine and welcomed its European choice, as stated in the association agreement."
The same sentence was present in the final communique of last year's EU-Ukraine summit but some EU member states, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, have recently been reluctant to commit to such positive language regarding future EU enlargement -- most notably in the statement celebrating the 10th anniversary of the bloc's Eastern Partnership in May 2019, where acknowledgment of the European aspirations of the bloc's eastern neighbors was omitted.
In previous EU-Ukraine summit statements there have also been remarks about Ukraine's 2017 education law, pushed mainly by Hungary, which believes that the law restricts the right of Ukraine's ethnic Hungarian minority to be educated in their native language.
Kyiv maintains the law is meant to ensure that all Ukrainian citizens can speak the state's official language, and it denies that the law is discriminatory.
The spat has prompted Budapest to block all meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission -- the key format for bilateral cooperation between Kyiv and the Western military alliance -- at all levels above that of ambassadors for the past two years.
During the negotiations with fellow EU member states, Hungary, however, welcomed the new Ukrainian administration's promise to look into certain aspects of the education law and agreed not to mention the issue in the statement, according to sources speaking on condition of anonymity,
But the summit statement is critical of certain rule-of-law issues, mentioning that there is an "urgent need to re-criminalize illicit enrichment and to ensure the necessary independence and effective functioning of all anti-corruption institutions" and adds that "effective rule of law, good governance, and economic opportunity are the best means to tackle foreign influence and destabilization attempts."
The annual summit is scheduled just ahead of Ukraine's snap parliamentary elections on July 21. A day after his inauguration on May 21, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a decree disbanding parliament and called the early vote.
Donetsk separatist referendum organizer detained:
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- The chief organizer of a 2014 Donetsk separatist "independence" referendum in eastern Ukraine condemned by the international community has been detained by Ukrainian authorities, Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko has announced.
"Citizen Lyagin is accused of treason," Lutsenko wrote in a Facebook post, which included a profile photograph of a man handcuffed and sitting at a desk. Lutsenko said Lyagin had been detained by the Prosecutor-General's Office and Ukraine's Security Service (SBU).
Lyagin is believed to be Roman Lyagin, a Donetsk separatist figure who declared himself the head of the separatists' makeshift election commission in the early days of the conflict that still grinds on between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine's newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has promised to come up with creative solutions to end the war, which has claimed the lives of some 13,000 people since April 2014. He has said he is ready to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to do so.
Lyagin organized a slapdash "independence" vote on May 11, 2014, as the conflict was deepening. The poll was so rushed that many voting booths were still being erected the morning of the vote and some of the ballot boxes used were still adorned with Ukraine's coat of arms -- a blue and yellow trident -- instead of the black, blue, and red flag of the Donetsk "people's republic" movement.
Later, Lyagin announced that some 90 percent of voters in the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk region had chosen self-rule. The poll was not monitored by any reputable international group and condemned by the international community, except for Russia.
His role in the vote -- as well as his role in blocking the official Ukrainian presidential vote from taking place in Donetsk later that month -- earned Lyagin a spot on the U.S. sanctions list in 2015.
It has also led the Prosecutor-General's Office to accuse him of treason and open a pretrial investigation into his activities, which an official statement released alongside Lutsenko's on June 14 said had included working "in the interests of the Russian Federation to the detriment of the public interest of Ukraine."
If tried and convicted, Lyagin could face 12 to 15 years in prison.
Lyagin served as the Donetsk "people's republic's" minister of labor and social policy from May 16 to September 26, 2014. After that, he again headed its election commission and organized a local leadership vote that November, which he told this reporter would "lend legitimacy to our power, and give us more distance from Kyiv."
Rumors of Lyagin's detention first circulated in March, when a Ukrainian lawmaker claimed to have information that he had fled Donetsk and turned himself in to Ukrainian authorities under an SBU program.
That program, known as "Someone's Waiting for You Back Home," offers separatists who have committed crimes under Ukrainian law the opportunity to turn state's witness in exchange for leniency.
Lyagin is believed to have spent time in a Donetsk separatist detention facility after falling out with and criticizing its leadership. He reportedly fled to Russia before entering Ukraine, where he was detained.
Lutsenko made no mention of the SBU program in his Facebook post or Lyagin possibly cooperating with Ukrainian authorities. But he did have a message for Lyagin: "It's time to pay."