Erdogan visits Ukraine for bilateral, regional talks

Erdogan's visit focuses on bilateral ties and the Crimean peninsula's ethnic Turkic minority. Turkey does not recognise Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will pay a one-day official visit to Ukraine on Monday. 

Erdogan and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro Poroshenko, will chair the sixth meeting of the Turkey-Ukraine High Level Strategic Council,  the Turkish leader's press office said last week.

The two leaders will exchange views on bilateral relations and regional issues in the capital, Kiev, where a number of agreements are also expected to be signed.

During his visit, Erdogan is also set to meet Parliament Chairman Andriy Parubiy and Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman.

US NATO envoy: ‘I get most info on Ukraine conflict from social networks’

Published time: May 08, 2015 00:04
Edited time: May 08, 2015 07:02 US Permanent Representative to NATO, Douglas Lute (Image from wikipedia.org)

The US Permanent Representative to NATO, Douglas Lute, has admitted that his knowledge about the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine comes mostly from social networks rather than intelligence reports.

“We should all ask ourselves: why is it that we know so little really about what is going on in Donbass,” the US ambassador to NATO told “Friends of Europe” forum in Brussels.

“I mean, frankly, I read more on social media about what is going on in the Donbass than I get from formal intelligence networks. This is because the networks don’t exist today,” Lute said.

READ MORE: Busted: Kiev MPs try to fool US senator with ‘proof’ of Russian tanks in Ukraine

The US envoy to NATO then backtracked, reacting to a comment made by Elena Donova, a member of the Russian delegation to NATO.

“I didn’t say that we ignored our intelligence sources. I just said that compared to the Cold War the systems that we once had twenty years ago have atrophied,” he said, adding that the “things have fundamentally changed.”

READ MORE: ‘Most convincing evidence’: Russian embassy trolls NATO with toy tanks

The reliability of social media as a source of information has been questioned throughout the conflict in Ukraine.
The latest example is an April tweet by US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt claiming that Russia’s military were continuing to expand their presence in eastern Ukraine. As for proof, Pyatt posted a two-year-old picture of an air defense system from an air show near Moscow.

Last July, Russia’s Defense Ministry questioned the authenticity of the satellite images of alleged shelling of Ukraine from Russian territory. It said the images were “created by US counselors” and posted by Pyatt on his Twitter microblog in an “informational merry-go-round” of fake pictures.

In August, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov ridiculed another so-called NATO proof, saying: “If earlier, someone would at least put their names on those images, be it Breedlove, Rasmussen, or even Lungescu, now, they are hesitant. It makes no sense to seriously comment on this,” he said.

Yet, this February, Ukrainian MPs followed the line, presenting a US senator with photos of what they said were Russian military hardware columns on Ukrainian territory. However, it turned out that the photos had been taken during Russia’s conflict with Georgia in South Ossetia back in 2008.

READ MORE: Russia shrugs off US envoy’s ‘evidence’ of Russian troops in Ukraine

The Ukrainian conflict erupted in April 2014 after Kiev sent troops to the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions after civilians there refused to recognize the new coup-imposed authorities in the capital. The Minsk accords, brokered by Russia, Germany and France in February of this year, brought several weeks of calm to the region, but ceasefire violations by both sides have been growing, hampering the peace process.

According to the UN human rights office, at least 6,116 people have been killed and 15,474 have been wounded during a year of fighting. Many fear that the true numbers could be much higher, however.

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‘WWII victory doesn’t bring Russia, Ukraine together as Kiev turned war criminals into heroes’

Published time: May 08, 2015 11:46 Ukraine as a new nation has to create a useable past, Arch Getty, Professor of Russian and Soviet history at UCLA told RT’s In the Now show. War criminals like Bandera, who killed a lot of civilians, are being praised by Kiev government now, he added.
RT: Mikhail Gorbachev said that snubbing the Victory parade is disrespect for the people who suffered enormous losses fighting Nazism. It's clearly not completely perceived this way in th, e United States. Why is that?

For Americans it was something that they read about in the newspapers or something they heard about on the radio. For the Soviet people it was in their neighborhood, it was in their face- their houses were burnt, their houses were bombed, their neighbors were slaughtered, their family was killed. It had immediacy in their lives. But I don’t think Americans can really understand very well, because for us, in the US, it was something that happened somewhere else, but not for the Soviet people.
RT: If Obama came to Moscow, would this be perceived as weakness amid the current global geopolitical climate in the world?
AG: I don’t think it would be by anybody who fought in the war, or anyone who remembered the war, because it was a joint allied effort. I don’t think it would be perceived as a weakness by anybody who knew anything about the war. In fact, you could even see it the opposite. Having had his sanctions fail to resort to this kind of blockade it seems patty; it seems juvenile, especially given the depth of the loss that the Soviet people felt. You can almost argue that he looks even weaker by not going.

RT: What's the attitude towards this victory in the West now? Is it some kind of inconvenient fact when a lot of what we’re seeing now is to paint Russia as an aggressor, to sort of commemorate what should be a joint victory?
AG: I think it is an inconvenient fact. But for a lot of Americans it is even not a fact at all because they were taught in their schools frequently, that we, Americans, won the war. The Soviet effort has always been minimized here, and that’s happened even more lately. By the time we came ashore on D-Day in June, 1944, the tide had turned on the Eastern Front against the Germans for a year and a half. The Soviets faced 10 times as many German divisions, as we did in the West. That is not a fact for a lot of Americans because they are still living in ignorance of who did what, who turned the tide and what the scale of the thing was. And the more governments on all sides try to rewrite history for their own current purposes the worse that gets.
RT: Shouldn't this victory be bringing Ukraine and Russia together?
AG: It certainly should, but it is not, and it won’t because Ukraine as a new nation, a new state more than anybody else has to create a useable past, a useable history. And they have done so in the most glaring kinds of ways that the Ukrainian Prime Minister, [Arseny] Yatsenyuk has said that WWII was about the Soviet Union invading Germany. War criminals in Ukraine, Bandera, people who killed Jews and many others are being touted as national heroes there for current political needs of the Ukrainian leadership. I’m afraid these celebrations are not going to do that simply because of the attitudes that are being taken.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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