Ukrainian politics is a game with few rules

Hainan provincial budget revenues increased Decrease in global tension depends on US position in talks with Russia, Duma speaker says. Vyacheslav Volodin pointed out that the US, circumventing the UN, "makes decisions on bombing sovereign states, invading the territories of other states".

Russia has to choose between de-escalation and confrontation, US diplomat says. Hainan medical tourism zone three years ahead of schedule in registering imported drugs. Sanya duty-free sales up Sanya's stores account for most of the island's total duty-free store sales. Media: Hainan Cultural Fair creates new incentives for free trade port. The organizers of the event arranged halls with a total area of 33, square meters to house the fair's pavilions. Hainan's Sanya becomes China's most popular holiday destination over New Year weekend.

Anatoly Antonov said that such pressure as the inability of the United States to defend its point of view at the negotiating table in a reasoned manner.

Polish soldier reveals murder of refugees at border area to Belarusian investigators. The Investigative Committee of Belarus initiates the organization of the collection of information and the recording of cases of disappearances of citizens travelling to Western Europe, in particular to Germany.

China's Customs issues Hainan's first comprehensive regional partnership certificate. The document will allow entrepreneurs to take advantage of preferential tariffs. More than a half of gas volume injected last year has already been withdrawn from underground storages in Europe, the company revealed. According to the Russian Foreign Minister, Russia will react to the actual development of events. The government announced its intention to implement the project at a forum held in Haikou.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said that the only way to a peaceful resolution of the internal Ukrainian crisis is the full implementation of the Minsk agreements. The majority of those killed were from Canada as well as nationals of Ukraine, Sweden, Britain and Afghanistan.

Earlier Tuesday, Ukraine's foreign minister said any NATO concession to Russia that it would not expand the alliance eastward would be a strategic defeat. In , Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula after the ouster of its Moscow-friendly leader and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in the country's east, where more than seven years of fighting has killed over 14, people.

A peace deal brokered by France and Germany has helped end large-scale battles, but frequent skirmishes have continued and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have failed. Zelenskyy met Tuesday with French and German officials who visited Kyiv after talks in Moscow the previous week to discuss prospects for another four-way meeting of the leaders of Russia, Ukraine France and Germany on the conflict.

As Wednesday's talks drew closer, the divide between the United States and Russia remained wide. Ambassador Julianne Smith. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meawhile, told reporters: "We see no significant reason for optimism. Stay on top of what's happening on the Hill with Rachel Aiello's updates on the minority Parliament when it's in session.

The Canadian Press Staff Contact. Reddit Share. According to a Canadian account of the phone cal, Trudeau "reaffirmed Canada's steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and emphasized that any military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including co-ordinated sanctions "He emphasized the co-ordination underway between Ukraine's partners in order to stand united in the face of Russian provocation.

Related Stories Russia, U. No progress seen after Russia-U. Starting from the first principles, this is a wholly Russia-manufactured crisis, the reasons behind which still remain unclear. Moscow's articulation of security fears from NATO enlargement, Ukrainian aggression in Donbas, or the latest reason du jour do not pass muster from a Western point of view, but what matters is that this is, arguably, how Moscow views the world and that is alarming in and of itself.

Russia holds the stronger hand regardless of what the White House may think or say publicly. This is not just a function of the fact that Moscow mobilized over , troops along Ukraine's border, that the Kremlin has presented a pair of " agreements " the line items of which are non-starters and entirely unrealistic, even if the underlying conditions they seek to address may appear sensible , or that it controls the speed and pace of the crisis.

These factors place the West on the back foot. To be clear, the stakes are high: Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, warned , "We need to figure out quite rapidly whether there is a basis to work on some of those issues Our military will be there, and then we will see whether there is any basis to continue on a diplomatic track.

The immediate crisis in Ukraine is absolutely the result of Moscow's actions. Yet, it is also a reflection of the United States' failure to articulate what it wants the relationship with Russia to be, or even a realistic appreciation of what that relationship could be. It's not enough for Washington to want it to be one way, Moscow has to want it to be that way, too.

So much of the Russia-related narrative remains fixated on the "post-Cold War" world or yet another reset, neither of which are instructive. Saying something is "post" tells us what it is not, not what it is, and another reset will achieve precisely nothing if nothing actually changes. As a result, the policy toolkit both carrots and sticks is alarmingly bare. Sanctions have not achieved the desired effect. The West's failure to push back against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in to say nothing of its annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Russia's continent-wide campaign of political warfare have only emboldened Moscow.

The West also continues to fail to appreciate the importance of hard power and conventional deterrence - to borrow a turn of phrase from London-based lecturer Mark Galeotti, negotiation without deterrence is merely an exercise in semantics and dialogue; deterrence without negotiation is a recipe for conflict.