The conflict area in Donbass continues to be heavily militarized, and the threat of conflict escalation remains, the First Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Jan Eliasson, said at a meeting of the UN Security Council on Dec 11.

"The conflict area remains heavily militarized. We see that a serious threat of escalation remains there," he said. According to Eliasson, most of the items of the "Minsk agreement" have not been achieved. And this situation jeopardizes the political process in …

On Thursday, December 10th, Interfax reported on the findings of the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat). The data indicates that the number of poor in Russia from January to September 2015 increased by millions of people and reached 20.3 million.

2.3 million Russians joined the poverty line this year.  The total poverty rate in the country amounted to 14.1%, an increase of almost 2% compared to the year 2014.  The largest number of poor in 2015 was in the …

The "Islamic State" organization has received approximately half a billion dollars from the oil trade.  Most of this amount is directed to the Syrian authorities and some part goes to Kurdish areas and Turkey.

According to the Treasury of the United States, about one third of the capital of the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) comes from trading black market oil.  The IS’s holdings are estimated at about $1.5 billion, said a senior official of the U.S. Treasurer on Thursday, …

In an article written in the magazine Delfi, Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Linas Linkevičius, wrote that the West has again called for "meaningful dialogue" with Russia, and it shows that the wars in Georgia and Ukraine have no changed much.

"It seemed like we had to learn a lesson. As soon as one country pulls the reins, the Kremlin takes it as a sign of weakness, as an opportunity or even the motivation to act more energetically", he wrote.

However, according to Linkevičius, this …

In his address to the UN Security Council on December 11th, the Director of Operations for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, John Ging, called on the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region to allow free access to humanitarian missions in the area.

According to Ging, there are currently only two international humanitarian organizations that are allowed to operate in the regions of Eastern Ukraine that are controlled by pro-Russian separatists, the AFP …