Klimkin: Tillerson pledges U.S. support against "Russian aggression":
By RFE/RL
WASHINGTON -- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin says U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has assured him that Washington will continue to support Kyiv in its standoff with Russia.
Klimkin made the comments outside the State Department on March 7 following a meeting with Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who now serves as President Donald Trump's top diplomat.
"He assured me that the United States would consistently continue to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russian aggression, that Ukraine is a key partner of the U.S. in the region, that the U.S. would also consistently support Ukraine on its path of reforms," Klimkin told reporters.
Trump suggested during the election campaign that he would consider lifting sanctions imposed on Russia by his predecessor, Barack Obama, in response to its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and the Kremlin's support for separatists in the country's east.
But Tillerson and other senior U.S. administration officials have publicly voiced a tougher stance since Trump's inauguration on January 20, saying that Russia must return Crimea to Ukraine and de-escalate violence in eastern Ukraine.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the meeting.
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Church denies Duma deputy's claim of weeping tsar in Crimea:
By RFE/RL
Russian Orthodox Church officials in the Kremlin-annexed Crimea region have refuted a controversial claim by State Duma Deputy Natalya Poklonskaya that a bust of Tsar Nicholas II in Simferopol wept tears on the centennial of his abdication of power.
The Eparchy in Crimea said on March 7 that a special commission checked Poklonskaya's claims on March 6 and found no traces of tears either on the bust or on icons in a chapel next to the bust.
The Eparchy said that the cleric at the chapel "should be instructed to watch the bust and report if tears appear on the bust."
Poklonskaya made the claim on March 3 in a televised program, saying that she had been informed of the "miracle" by colleagues in Crimea, where she briefly served as the Moscow-imposed prosecutor after Russia seized and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.
Nicholas was executed along with his entire family in 1918 by the Bolsheviks, who by then had seized power.