The Lviv district administrative court begins hearings today about Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov not speaking Ukrainian, but Russian. Lviv activist Svyatoslav Litynskyy is demanding that the Interior Ministry provide him with Ukrainian translations of the minister's statements.
First Litynskyy asked the ministry to give him the information it published on its YouTube channel in Ukrainian. The videos of Avakov on the channel were of him speaking Russian. However, the ministry never answered his demands, so Litynskyy took the matter to court.
"I was told that they didn't understand what I was asking; that it wasn't the ministry who uploaded videos to its YouTube channel, but other people, and that's not true," Litynskyy said. "Avakov must, I believe, make all the official commentaries in Ukrainian."
Avakov himself said that he knows how to speak Ukrainian -- particularly when he is in Lviv. The minister thinks that the court hearings are a PR stunt on Litynskyy's part.
"What's important is that you understand me, whether I speak Russian or Ukrainian," Avakov said. "If somebody wants to show off, sorry. To sue the minister and get fame out of it -- let him have it."
In Artemivsk, in the Donetsk region, a retired woman has been holding a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin's policies. She sits at a central trolleybus stop in the city with a sign that has a photograph of Putin with a glass of wine in his hand along with the caption, "To idiots! Without you, I wouldn’t be here."
The woman, whose name is Oleksandra, has been coming to the bus stop for a few days now. She has decided that to hold the protest on a daily basis -- she promises to be at same spot every day from 10 a.m.to 11:30 a.m.
Oleksandra explained that an article on the way Putin "is destroying Russia" prompted her to protest. According to her, passers-by have had different opinions about her sign.
"Every day, I record the ratio," she says. "The amounts of people who support me, and those who say nothing, are equal. Thirty percent don't themselves understand what they are saying. I can’t even call this a reaction or aggression -- it's madness."
Russia says it has spent around 60 million dollars on Ukrainian refugees, according to the current exchange rate. The head of the Russian Investigation Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, cited this figure during a meeting about "combating civilian human rights violations in southeast Ukraine."
"According to the data on expenditure on refugees from Ukraine … the Russian Federation suffered damage worth over 4 billion rubles," Bastrykin said.
Russia claims that it has given shelter to 2.6 million Ukrainians, one million of whom left Ukraine because of the conflict in Donbas. However, according to the UN, a total of over a million people left Ukraine for Russia.