A piece from Ukraine Pravda on the importance of the ag sector to Ukraine's economy:
Russia is ready to restructure Ukraine’s $3-billion debt and allow Kyiv to pay a billion per year in 2016-2018, said Russian President Vladimir Putin today.
In Turkey at the G20 summit, Putin added that Russia expected guarantees from the West about Ukraine’s creditworthiness and that he hoped the issue of restructuring Ukraine’s debt would be solved by the end of the year.
“We made an unexpected offer. We didn’t simply agree on restructuring, but offered better conditions than the International Monetary Fund was asking for,” said the Russian president.
Putin discussed the issues of debt paying guarantees by Ukraine with U.S. President Barack Obama and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, RFE/RL Ukrainian Service reports.
Journalists have different takes at Vladimir Putin's speech at G20:
Members of the Opposition bloc, largely made up of members of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions, won mayoral elections in at least two Ukrainian cities -- both in eastern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
According to official results, in Kryvyy Rih, Yuriy Vilkul saved his mayoral seat with 50.21 percent of voteds. His opponent, a representative of the Samopomich party, Yuriy Myloboh, received 49.79 percent -- only 752 votes less.
Myloboh has already claimed that the election results are falsified and says he is preparing a lawsuit to nullify them.
(Vilkul’s son Oleksandr, also a member of the Opposition bloc, lost a mayoral seat to Ukrop party member Boris Filatov in the regional center, Dnipropetrovsk, according to preliminary results.)
In Pavlohrad, Opposition bloc member Anatoliy Vershyna received 59.68 percent of votes, while his opponent from Ukrop party, Yevhen Terekhov, got 40.31 percent. Terekhov has already acknowledged that he lost the elections.
Crimean news aggregator Obyektivny Krym published an alleged photo of a cactus, more than a century old, defaced by Russian tourists.
A cactus growing in the Nikitsky Botanical garden now bears scratches in Russian that read “Moscow” and “Obama is a shmuck.”
Deputy general director of the garden, Andrei Pashtetsky, confirmed the information to Russian news website Moslenta.
“Tourists arrived and, so to speak, immortalized themselves. This won’t come off the cacti,” he said.