Two of the candidates in the highly contested Presidential elections in Ukraine next year, presented their ideas for the future at the annual YES conference. Together they proposed a vision reminiscent of Kuchma and Yanukovych.

The last four years have been challenging for the Ukrainian state. Would anyone have dealt with everything better than President Poroshenko?

The money trail left behind by Yulia Tymoshenko ahead of the 2019 presidential elections in Ukraine raises some serious questions.

Ahead of next years Presidential elections in Ukraine, opinion polls are just as doubtful as they have been before crucial elections in the West.

Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko and the proposals made at her June 15th “New Deal” congress resemble those introduced by Nicolás Maduro, successor to military officer and President Hugo Chávez, a socialist-populist who ruled Venezuela from 1999-2013. Chávez and Maduro are anti-democratic leaders who have ruined the country’s once strong economy based upon it being a major oil producer.

Who is for and who is against reforms in the Ukrainian parliament? The answer to that question might be more complex than it might seem at first glance.

NATO has accepted countries with problems concerning territorial integrity in the past. However none of the size and strategic importance such as Ukraine. What are some of the arguments in favour of Kyiv entering the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation?

The opaque money trail behind Yulia Tymoshenko's bid to become Ukraine's next President. How a lack of transparency and the involvement of suspicious characters threaten Ukraine's democratic process.

The Polish discussion on Ukraine and the “Eastern Question” filled the pages of many of the underground publications that existed in the 1980s in communist Poland. Similar to Kultura since the late 1940s, they called for reconciliation between former enemies and mutual forgiveness for past crimes committed by all sides.

Growing up in northern England I was surrounded by nationalisms of different kinds. Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland were at war in Ulster and had brought their terrorist campaign to the British mainland. Eastern European refugees from the communist bloc had brought their nationalisms with them to Great Britain and these continued to open old wounds in the émigré ghettos. The two biggest of these nationalisms were Ukrainian and Polish. Most members of the Ukrainian community in Britain were members of the three wings of the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) with the Stepan Bandera wing by far the largest. Their primary enemy though was the Russians and the Soviet empire – not Poles or Poland.

One of the best examples of fake news in the post-communist world is the finger pointing by Russia and Poland towards Ukraine. Instead of looking in the mirror at the mainstreaming of nationalist discourse both countries point to “nationalists” in Ukraine. Yet, populists with nationalistic tendencies receive between 40 and 70 per cent support in Polish or Russian elections respectively, while in Ukraine they are unable to cross the four per cent threshold to enter parliament. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s Solidarity party has never given its support to rallies of nationalists.

On August 2nd, US President Donald Trump reluctantly signed tough new sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea. He had little choice since they passed both houses of the US Congress unanimously; 419 to 3 in the House of Representatives and 98 to 2 in the Senate, enabling them to block any presidential veto if Trump had decided not to sign them into law.

The twists and turns of the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia have reached a new level with the discovery that one of the Russian contacts his campaign had was with Viktor Medvedchuk. The former Defence Intelligence Agency chief, Michael Flynn, and other advisers to the Trump campaign were in contact with Russian officials in at least 18 telephone calls and emails during the last seven months of last years’ US presidential election.