Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik was a KGB illegal, originally from Kyiv in Ukraine, who was sent to Canada by Moscow Centre in 1951. Aware that border controls between Canada and the U.S. were lax to the point of invisibility, the KGB plan was to use Canada as a staging post for the infiltration of its illegals into the United States

Nearly two years after a May 2014 referendum that took place in Donetsk on establishing self-rule in the region, Zakharchenko said the elections will be held "in line with the (so-called Donetsk People's) republic's laws, because the republic has paid its bloody price for its freedom."

"It is no longer fashionable to look up to the American experience. And yet it is imperative that Ukraine, a new nation in the process of creating itself after more than three centuries of Russian domination, the Soviet nightmare and a period of post-Soviet oligarchic drift, try to understand why the United States has been so successful and to apply at least some of its lessons at home."

While Russia's retaliatory response to the Ukraine-EU free trade agreement was predictable, its closest ally Belarus surprisingly announced that it would uphold its own free trade agreement with Ukraine. Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka's decision is the latest in a string of anti-Kremlin policies emanating from Minsk.

In the case of decentralization, the Constitutional Court judges have every reason to fear the President (and Parliament to a lesser degree) and presumably, plenty of incentive to find a favorable verdict given the financial resources of the party in power. Thus, the President’s dismissal this week of four judges including the infamous Pecherskiy Rayon Court Judge Rodion Kireyev (who presided over the trial resulting in the “conviction” and subsequent prison sentence for Yulia Tymoshenko) takes on additional significance.