Multiple sources, including "Vedomosti" and our Ukrainian Service (below), are reporting that several Kremlin aides purportedly responsible for relations with the Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" in eastern Ukraine have quit. Other, lower-level staff within the department have left in recent months, the reports claim.
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Interfax on reports that the still-embattled former Georgian president might be offered a job by officials in Ukraine:
There is no final decision yet over Georgian candidates for jobs in the Ukrainian government, says Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's former president.
"Various candidatures were considered for various ministries: But, as far as I understand, no final decision has been made," Saakashvili told reporters in Kyiv on Monday.
There are several candidates, he said without naming them.
"This is within the remit of the Ukrainian government," he said.
Saakashvili also said that he had met with Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Groisman. "We discussed Georgia's aid for Ukraine, including at the international level, and maximum lobbying of Ukraine's interests internationally," he added.
The ex-Georgian president, who faces criminal charges in his home country, would not say whether he has been invited to work in the Ukrainian government.
Russians instead should remember the “historic” words Stalin uttered on February 4, 1931, and launch a similar mobilization program to rebuild and expand Russia’s industrial base.
Such an effort, Super suggests, would allow the country to withstand any foreign challenges just as Stalin’s allowed the USSR to hold out “against the united force of Europe in the Great Fatherland War.”
Read more of Paul Goble's piece here: