Acclaimed Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart has written a really nice travel piece on the atmosphere that prevails in Ukrainian capital right now. Here's a taster:
Being driven into Kiev, I can tell something is different from my usual jaunts to the former Soviet Union. My cabbie isn’t complaining about Tajiks being lazy, Chechens violent, Jews arrogant, or Georgian youths partying too loudly in this building’s courtyard—the usual racist babble. Although, according to the talk show on the taxi’s radio, there is a lot to complain about. The hryvnia, the local currency, is down 60 percent for the year and inflation is up by 50 percent, the result of the nightmarish Moscow-directed civil war in Donetsk and Luhansk to the east, a conflict that has hit a stalemate by the time of my visit. And, more impressive, almost every single billboard running into the city has been commandeered for the upcoming local elections. It would appear that half of Kiev’s population is running for mayor. There’s the Party of Simple Folks; the Dill Party, which promises “concrete results”; a cartoon rhinoceros who promises “reform”; and the party of the current president, Poroshenko, promising nothing less than “peace.” If I could vote, I’d probably cast it for the “free Wi-Fi” party.
Throughout my stay I will be told how many of the candidates are in the pockets of corrupt oligarchs (et tu, Dill Party?), but the cacophony of democracy is still impressive, louder and more urgent than anything you will find in the European Union, to which Ukraine desperately aspires to belong. After being in Kiev for 40 minutes, I feel oddly safe and free.
Read the entire article here
RFE/RL's Tony Wesolowsky and Olha Komarova have been reporting on the big hike in Ukrainian household electricity bills:
Ukraine Raises Electricity Rates For Households
Viktoria Sydorenko makes do with just one light bulb instead of five to light her apartment in the Ukrainian city of Odesa on the Black Sea.
"I used to use at least two for normal lighting," Sydorenko told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
She and millions of other Ukrainians are thinking twice these days about when to flick the switch and when not to.
That's because the country's electricity regulator has just hit them all with a 25 percent rate hike effective March. And it won't stop there. Another rate increase is due in September.
For more than 10 ten years, electricity rates for consumers hardly changed, and costs for power generation and distribution were passed on to industry, small businesses, and government agencies, Vasyl Kotko, the chairman of Ukraine's National Energy Regulatory Commission (NERC), explained to RFE/RL.
Echoing what experts have said in the past, Kotko said that high energy prices have made Ukrainian businesses uncompetitive, while low prices have given consumers little reason to save power.
When it comes to wasting energy, Ukraine is literally at the top of the global charts. The country's energy intensity -- the ratio of energy used relative to economic output -- is twice that of Russia and 10 times that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. According to the UN, there is no country in the world more energy intensive than Ukraine.
Read the entire article here
We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow morning, you can catch up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with this item from our news desk that touches on a major power outage that affected Ukraine last year:
U.S. Spy Chief Expects More Power Grid Attacks Like One In Ukraine
The head of the U.S. National Security Agency has warned that hackers will inevitably attack U.S. infrastructure in an attempt to cause a power failure like the one in Ukraine last year.
Admiral Michael Rogers told a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco that it is a "matter of when, not if" a foreign state launches a cyberattack on U.S. targets.
"An actor penetrated the Ukrainian power grid and brought large segments of it offline in a very well-crafted attack that both focused on knocking the system down but also focused on how was the provider likely to respond to that outage," Rogers said.
"Seven weeks ago, it was Ukraine. That isn't the last we are going to see of this, and that worries me."
Rogers said he is also worried about potential cyberthreats by terrorist groups such as Islamic State.
The U.S. government last week confirmed that a December 23 blackout in Ukraine that affected 225,000 customers was the result of a cyberattack.
Private researchers have linked the incident to a Russian hacking group known as "Sandworm."