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US sanctions against Russia over Ukraine and Syria to remain BBC News US sanctions imposed against Russia over its annexation of Crimea are to remain, President Donald Trump says. Mr Trump tweeted that it would be premature to consider any relaxation "until the Ukrainian and Syrian problems are solved". The president ... Donald Trump rules out easing Russia sanctions unless Syria, Ukraine issues resolvedEconomic Times Russian stance on Ukraine, Syria never affected by US sanctions: lawmakerXinhua all 1,025 news articles »

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US sanctions against Russia over Ukraine and Syria to remain - BBC News

A week after the G20 summit in Hamburg, foreign affairs and US president Trump will be again on the EU agenda.

On Thursday and Friday (13-14 July), Donald Trump will be hosted in Paris by French president Emmanuel Macron to celebrate Bastille Day. US troops will participate in the traditional military parade to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the US entry in World War One.

Macron wants to "extend a hand" to Trump, so that he is not "isolated", and in order to bring him "back into the circle", French government spokesman Christophe Castaner told French TV last week.

At the G20, Trump was left alone on trade and climate issues against the other world leaders.

According to a White House statement, issued after Trump accepted Macron's invitation, "the two leaders will further build on the strong counter-terrorism cooperation and economic partnership between the two countries, and they will discuss many other issues of mutual concern."

Trump will arrive in Paris on Thursday. According to French media, he will visit a US military cemetery before meeting the French president. Then the two leaders, with their wives, would have dinner in a restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The issue of the war in Ukraine might also be be raised, as Macron is part of the so-called Normandy group on the war in Ukraine, alongside German chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Both Trump and Macron met with Putin in Hamburg.

Ukraine will also be on the EU agenda this week, with an EU-Ukraine summit taking place in Kiev on Wednesday and Thursday.

The summit will be the first one since visa liberalisation for Ukrainians coming to the EU, which entered into force last month.

It will be also the first since the Netherlands became the last member state to ratify the EU-Ukraine free trade and association agreement in May.

European Commission and European Council presidents, Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, will meet Poroshenko to discuss the conflict in Ukraine and the implementation of the Minsk peace agreement, as well as the ongoing reform process in the country.

The EU is asking Ukrainian authorities to do more to reform the justice and administrative system, fight corruption and devolve more powers to the regions.

EU diplomacy chief Federica Mogherini will also be in Kiev. Before going, she will meet with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Brussels on Tuesday.

In the EU capital, the week will start with a quiet Eurogroup meeting, which only includes the eurozone's finance ministers. For the first time in months, as an EU official noted last week, Greece will not be on the agenda.

On Tuesday, all 28 EU finance ministers will adopt the country-specific economic recommendations, elaborated on by the commission, and discuss how to address non-performing loans loans that banks cannot have paid back, especially since the financial crisis, and which affect the banking sector.

After their meeting, the German, Irish, Italian and Dutch ministers, Wolfgang Schaeuble, Paschal Donohoe, Pier Carlo Padoan and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, will be heard by the European Parliament's inquiry committee on money laundering and tax evasion.

On Wednesday, MEPs in the civil liberties committee will discuss search and rescue activities in the Mediterranean. They will hear from Italian authorities, EU agencies and organisations.

The issue had become controversial after NGOs that rescue migrants, who are attempting to cross from Libya to the Europe, have been accused of favouring human smugglers.

Last week, EU member states backed Italy, which is preparing a code of conduct for NGOs, but refused to help by opening up their ports to boats that carry rescued people. Italy has earlier threatened to close its ports to these vessels.

Also on Wednesday, the committee will hear from Greeces immigration minister, Ioannis Mouzalas, and an UNHCR representative about EU support for Greece in the reception and integration of refugees.

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Trump, Ukraine and NGO sea rescues This WEEK - EUobserver

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Ukraine to reaffirm support for the former Soviet republic two days after the first meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Trump and Putin held more than two hours oftalks at the Group of 20 nations meetingFriday in Hamburg, Germany, though little was disclosed about their discussions on Ukraine.For more than three years, the country has been locked in a conflict with its neighbor over the annexation of Crimea and Russian backing for an insurgency.

Ive been very clear in my discussions with Russian leadership on more than one occasion that it is necessary for Russia to take the first steps to de-escalate the situation in the east part of Ukraine, Tillerson told reportersSunday in Kiev, the capital, after meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. We call on Russia to honor its commitments and exercise influence over the separatists in the region.

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

U.S. support has been key to Ukraine containing the conflict in its easternmost regions and rebuilding its economy following a second pro-democracy revolution in a decade. While President Barack Obamas administration provided diplomatic, financial and non-lethal military backing, Trump suggested during his election campaign that he may relax U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine and may even recognize Crimea.

Tillerson said sanctions against Russia will stay in place until peace accords are implemented. Trump tweeted Sunday that he didnt discuss sanctions with Putin and that nothing will be done until the Ukrainian and Syrian problems are solved.

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Trump, who met Poroshenko in Washington in June, sought before his meeting with Putin to alleviate concerns that hed be too accommodating. During a trip to Warsaw on the eve of the G-20, Trump urged Russia to to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere. He also explicitly backed NATOs collective-defense commitment and promised more energy supplies for Poland as eastern Europe seeks to avoid an over-reliance on Russian natural gas.

Tillerson on Friday appointed Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO and National Security Council director, to be special representative for Ukraine.

We are going to change the status quo because continuingto leave things the way they are is simply not acceptable, Tillerson said. We have to reinvigorate these talks to move forward, and that is the purpose of our engagement and the purpose of Ambassadors Volker appointment. Volker will spend several days in Kiev for talks, Poroshenko told the same news conference.

Discussions to revive a stalled peace accord for Ukraine are frequently held with the participation of Germany and France, as well as Ukraine and Russia.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron held talks with Putin on Ukraineon Saturday. Leaders will most likely speak by phone this month, with the call to be followed by a summit, Poroshenko said.

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Tillerson Reassures Ukraine After Trump and Putin Meet at G-20 - Bloomberg

BORYSPIL, Ukraine -- When departure information disappeared from Kiev airport's website after last month's cyberattack, employees trained a camera on the departure board and broadcast it to YouTube. When government servers were switched off, officials posted updates to Facebook. And with the disruption continuing, office workers have turned to Gmail to keep their businesses going.

As Ukraine's digital infrastructure shuddered under the weight of the June 27 cyberattack, Silicon Valley firms played an outsize role in keeping information flowing, an illustration both of their vast reach and their unofficial role as a kind of emergency backup system. Google's mail service has been helping some firms stay open after their email servers crashed, while Facebook is credited as a critical platform for digital first responders.

"Our war room, nationwide, migrated to Facebook," said Andrey Chigarkin, the chief information security officer at a Kiev-based gaming firm and active participant in the early hours of the online response. "All the news -- bad, good -- was coming through Facebook."

Facebook has a relatively low popularity in Ukraine, counting between 8 million to 9 million monthly active users compared to 10 million to 15 million in Poland, a neighbor of roughly the same size, according to figures provided by analytics firm SocialBakers. But it's still a powerful medium there and is credited with being an accelerant for the protest movement that toppled the Russia-friendly leader Viktor Yanukovich in 2014. Today, government agencies regularly post official statements to their Facebook walls, and press officers eschew emails to chat with journalists over Facebook Messenger.

"Facebook in Ukraine is a big thing," said Dmytro Shymkiv, the deputy head of Ukraine's presidential administration and a former director of Microsoft Ukraine.

Shymkiv was among the many officials who turned to Facebook to post updates about the outbreak as it happened. In an interview at his office, he said "the cloud" -- a marketing term for the pool of sometimes free computing power offered by the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and many others -- provided the safety and redundancy that many businesses in Ukraine lacked.

"It's a global backup," he said, adding that, as a former tech executive, he knew that Silicon Valley firms put an "enormous focus on the security of the cloud services."

Private businesses and even government offices are still relying at least in part on Silicon Valley firms' email and chat services, mainly as a substitute for downed mail servers. Victor Zhora, the chief executive of Kiev-based Infosafe, said two of the firms he's helping to recover from the outbreak have switched to Gmail as they try to get back on their feet. In one pediatric clinic in the Kharkivskyi area of Kiev, Dr. Lidiia Podkopaieva said staff turned to Facebook-owned WhatsApp to coordinate their work at the facility after half their computers were wiped out.

Some workarounds were more creative than others.

At Boryspil Airport, outside Kiev, officials faced a quandary when they switched off their automated systems during the attack. Although the airport was operating smoothly, anxious passengers could no longer access departure information from the Web.

"So in front of the departure board we set up a webcam which broadcast the board to the Web and to our Facebook page," senior airport official Yevhenii Dykhne said in an interview last week. "We got 10,000 views on YouTube."

Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said the outbreak had shown that the Silicon Valley's cloud was much more resilient "than a Ukrainian physical server standing alone in a post office," a reference to one of Ukraine's worst-hit agencies.

But he expressed reservations about leaning too heavily on American computing power in times of need. After all, what would happen if a differently tailored cyberattack brought the cloud crashing down?

"Definitely we should build a much more sustainable network in case of emergency," he said. "We cannot just rely on Facebook as a backup."

Information for this article was contributed by Dmytro Vlasov and Efrem Lukatsky of The Associated Press.

SundayMonday Business on 07/10/2017

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Ukrainian services hit by virus jury-rigged Facebook, Google - Arkansas Online

HAMBURG Measures are needed that will lead to a genuine ceasefire in Ukraine, and implementation of the Minsk agreements to end the conflict there has been too slow, the Kremlin said on Saturday.

With Ukraine on the agenda, President Vladimir Putin earlier met with his counterparts from France and Germany, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, on the fringes of the G20 summit in Hamburg.

Macron said he had no ready solution to the crisis, but that the three countries had had a "good discussion" about it.

"If I had a solution in my pocket I would have already used it and shared it with my friends," the French president said in a video posted on his Facebook account.

"We know how complicated the situation is on the ground, so we are negotiating."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was an understanding between the three countries that "effective measures should be taken, which would lead to real ceasefire on the frontline and to ensure military hardware withdrawal".

"The Minsk accords are being implemented too slowly, serious disappointment is not concealed," Peskov told reporters during a regular conference call.

Macron said Normandy format talks involving France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine would probably take place in coming weeks.

Progress on implementing the Minsk peace accords in an eastern Ukrainian, negotiated by Berlin and Paris, has stalled. The agreement was designed to end a conflict that has killed thousands of people since April 2014.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Marine Pennetier; editing by John Stonestreet)

HAMBURG Leaders from the world's leading economies broke with U.S. President Donald Trump on climate policy at a G20 summit on Saturday, in a rare public admission of disagreement and blow to multilateral cooperation.

MOSUL/ERBIL, Iraq Islamic State militants vowed to "fight to the death" in Mosul on Saturday as Iraqi military commanders said they would take full control of the city from the insurgents at any moment.

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Kremlin says steps needed for genuine ceasefire in Ukraine - Reuters