During 2016, 150 merchant vessels, flying the flags of 49 foreign countries, entered ports of the occupied Crimea – Yevpatoria, Sevastopol, Yalta, Feodosia, and Kerch – violating bans and sanctions, as demonstrated by the monitoring of the information portal, BSNews, which uses an AIS (automatic identification system) vessel tracking system.

In 2016, another 40 vessels that violated the policies of the occupied territory for the first time were added to the list of old violators, which entered …

To keep its status as a transit country, Ukraine needs to get a European company to manage its natural gas transportation system, the head of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, Andriy Kobolyev proposed.

"The ultimate goal of the process of creating a separate GTS operator is to involve a European company... that has its own interests. In fact we want to share a part of our business to make them help us guarantee that transit through the territory of Ukraine will remain after 2019," he said on Channel 5 …

The Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs and OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Sebastian Kurtz, during his visit to the Donbas, said that the Organization is not satisfied with the current situation in eastern Ukraine, where the armed conflict continues after more than two years.

He stressed that the OSCE is committed, "to step up the efforts to improve the situation," and in order to do so, Austria will allocate an additional 2 million euro for humanitarian aid to the residents of the Donetsk and …

Ukraine is planning to hold regular missile firing exercises in the Black Sea, Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak said in an interview with Channel 5.

"I consider these exercises as very good and necessary. We are not going to ask anyone which exercises we should hold in our own territory. They will be held as regularly as needed,” Poltorak stated.

According to the Minister, Russian authorities reacted strongly to the exercises held by Ukraine. He added that the Defense Ministry was ready to …

The President of the French right-wing populist party, the National Front, Marine Le Pen, requested foreign financial institutions, including Russian banks, to fund her election campaign, as she stated in her interview with French TV Channel BFMTV on January 4th.

According to her, all French banks have refused to give her a loan for her election campaign before the first round of presidential elections in France in April 2017. Currently, Le Pen is in need of 6 million Euros.

“I submitted …

Preliminary research shows that the bodies of some of the victims of the Smolensk plane crash, which occurred on the 10th of April 2010, were misplaced, as reported by the Polish Press Agency citing its own sources.

According to the Agency’s sources, the remains from the grave of the Undersecretary of State of the Office of the President of the Republic of Poland, Mariusz Handzlik, probably belong to the Chief of the Polish Olympic Committee, Piotr Nurowski.

In early December, after the  …

Moldovan President Igor Dodon and Vadim Krasnoselski, the head of the unrecognized Moldovan Transdniestrian Republic, held a meeting, which is the first time the leaders of Moldova and Transdniestria met in eight years. The parties identified a number of issues requiring urgent solutions, according to Transdniestria’s press service.

The main agenda was about freedom of movement for citizens, recognition of documents, railroads, and communication. "Contact has taken place. The meeting was …

United States senators are preparing a bipartisan draft bill about additional sanctions against Russia in connection with its hacker attacks on American political institutions and its activities in Ukraine and Syria. The Voice of America reported that the lawmakers confirmed this information when the Senate convened for a new session of Congress.

Senator Ben Cardin, the leading Democrat of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters in Capitol Hill on January 3 that he was working on the …