U.S. puts six Crimeans in Russian parliament on sanctions blacklist:
By RFE/RL
The United States has added six Crimean representatives newly elected to Russia's parliament to its sanctions blacklist for supporting Moscow's illegal annexation of the Ukrainian territory in 2014.
The six -- Dmitry Belik, Andrei Kozenko, Konstantin Bakharev, Svetlana Savchenko, Ruslan Balbek, and Pavel Shperov -- were all elected on September 18 to represent the Black Sea peninsula and its naval port of Sevastopol.
The elections were "illegitimate," the U.S. Treasury said on November 14, adding that the sanctions announcement follows similar action against the six by the European Union.
They were complicit in policies "that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine," it said.
The move was part of "maintaining pressure on Russia until it respects the security and sovereignty of Ukraine," said John Smith, acting director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
"Treasury will continue to sanction those individuals involved in Russia's annexation of Crimea and its destabilizing activities in Ukraine," he said.
The sanctions bar Americans and U.S. corporations from doing business with the six. Any assets they have on U.S. territory are also frozen. (w/AFP)
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Monday, November 14, 2016. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage. Thanks for reading and take care.
Investigation Uncovers Poroshenko's, Allies' Spanish Coastal Villas
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- Along the picturesque shores of Estepona in southern Spain's Costa del Sol lie some of Europe's most elegant resorts and luxury estates, whose owners and residents include Hollywood actors, superstar athletes, and some of the continent's political elite.
But the list of property owners also includes the head of state, along with several key allies, of one of postcommunist Europe's most beleaguered and corruption-riddled states, an RFE/RL investigation has learned.
The Spanish properties of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; Ihor Kononenko, a deputy head of the president's Bloc of Petro Poroshenko party and onetime business partner; and Oleh Hladkovskyy, a deputy secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, had previously been kept secret.
Each of those three men owns a lavish Mediterranean-style villa on or near the coast -- and in Kononenko's case, a second plot of land, too.
But none of the properties is enumerated in those public officials' publicly searchable asset declarations that came due on October 30 as part of a new, International Monetary Fund (IMF)-backed push to boost transparency and root out graft, according to an investigative program of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, Skhemy (Schemes), that aired on November 10.
Instead, the declarations of Poroshenko, a confectionery mogul before his rise to the presidency of war-torn Ukraine in mid-2014, and Kononenko and Hladkovskyy include companies that in turn own the Spanish homes -- effectively rendering them invisible from public view.
Corruption has been a persistent problem in Ukraine, contributing to political stagnation that followed the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004-05 and the Euromaidan unrest a decade later that unseated a president. Western officials and international financial institutions insist such criminality is still a problem and threatens billions in assistance that have helped keep the country afloat since Russian troops invaded and seized Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014.