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Denis Voronenkov, who'd been a Communist member of Russia's lower legislative house before he left, was fatally shot outside a hotel in broad daylight, officials said.

Voronenkov becomes the latest in a string of Russian critics of President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government who were killed or injured in mysterious circumstances.

The suspect in his death died in the hospital after a shootout with Voronenkov's bodyguard.

Poroshenko's accusation drew a sharp rebuke from Moscow. Any claims that Russia is connected to the killing are "absurd," Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to Russian state-run TASS news agency.

Details about the shooting weren't immediately released. CNN video shows investigators standing over the bloodied body of Voronenkov, lying face-up on a Kiev sidewalk near the Premier Palace hotel.

The suspect was wounded and taken to a hospital where he later died, Kiev police Chief Andriy Krischenko said.

Details about the suspect's identity and who injured him weren't available. No motive for the attack was immediately known.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko said Voronenkov had given "extremely important testimony" to Ukraine's military prosecutors.

Voronenkov's killing was "a demonstrative execution of a witness," Lutsenko said.

Voronenkov and his wife, former Russian lawmaker Maria Maksakova, sharply criticized Putin after they left Russia for Ukraine in October.

Voronenkov also alleged that although he was recorded as having voted for the annexation in Russia's Duma, the vote was cast against his will. He was not at parliament that day, and another legislator used Voronenkov's card to vote for him, he told Radio Free Europe.

The day after that interview, Peskov, Putin's spokesman, denied Voronenkov's claim.

Voronenkov said he thought his criticisms led Russian authorities to charge him in absentia with fraud in February, Radio Free Europe reported. He called the charges "fake" and "political," the report said.

Voronenkov said he'd become a Ukrainian citizen. While he was a Communist Party member, his wife had belonged to the ruling United Russia party.

Yanukovych was Ukraine's President when, in 2013, he suspended talks on what was to be a landmark political and trade deal with the European Union. Russia had opposed Ukraine forming closer ties with the European Union.

Tens of thousands of pro-Western protesters rallied in Kiev against Yanukovych's decision, and in February 2014, a gunfight between protesters and police left dozens dead. Yanukovych soon fled, eventually for Russia, as his guards abandoned the presidential compound.

Russia's parliament signed off on Putin's request to send military forces into Crimea the next month. An uprising by pro-Russian rebels in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk ensued, a conflict that has left thousands of people dead and injured.

"I told (prosecutors) some details of what was going on. And I will give testimony in open court in the course of judicial inquiry held in Ukraine," Voronenkov told Radio Free Europe.

Voronenkov is one of several Kremlin critics to die or be injured in mysterious circumstances.

Five suspects have been on trial in Moscow since October, with one accused of accepting cash to kill him. All have pleaded not guilty.

Putin blamed extremists and protesters who he said were trying to stir internal strife in Russia. But people close to Nemtsov have expressed concern that he was killed because of his opposition to the government.

It was the second time in two years Kara-Murza fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning.

In 2013, Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky was found dead inside his house in Britain with a noose around his neck. His falling-out with the Russian government had left him self-exiled in the United Kingdom.

A coroner's officer said it couldn't say whether Berezovsky killed himself. That year, Putin said he could not rule out that foreign secret services had a role in Berezovsky's death, but he added that there was no evidence of this.

In July 2009, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home in the Russian republic of Chechnya and found shot to death in a neighboring republic the same day. She had spent years investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya.

The head of the group Estemirova worked for, Memorial, accused the Kremlin-backed Chechen leadership of ordering her killing. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov denied involvement in her death, calling it a "monstrous crime" that was carried out to discredit his government.

In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist critical of Russia's war in Chechnya, was gunned down at the entrance to her Moscow apartment.

The Kremlin has staunchly denied accusations that it or its agents are targeting political opponents or had anything to do with the deaths.

Journalist Victoria Butenko reported from Ukraine, and CNN's Jason Hanna wrote in Atlanta. CNN's Antonia Mortensen, Nick Thompson, Alanne Orjoux, Holly Yan and Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.

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Putin critic Denis Voronenkov dead: Ukraine's leader calls ...

President of Ukraine Petro Poroschenko on March 02, 2017 in Kiev, Ukraine. Gabriel is on a two-day trip to conduct talks with government representatives.Thomas TrutschelPhotothek via Getty Images

In Ukraine, things have taken another turn for the worse. In January, Ukrainian army veterans began an unofficial blockade of rail traffic into the country's breakaway eastern provinces to protest their government's willingness to do business with the pro-Russian separatists holding power there. On March 15, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, anxious to regain control of the situation and to keep the confidence of his supporters, made the blockade official. Separatists remain defiant. Russia is reportedly recognizing travel documents from the breakaway provinces for entry into Russia, and we're getting closer to the moment when Moscow will move to formalize trade and economic links with the separatist territories.

In other words, the Ukrainian stalemate has deepened. Ukraine has fallen behind Western neighbors like Poland and Hungary over the past 25 years. A higher standard of living depends on closer engagement with Europe, but peace and security still demand stable relations with Moscow. This puts Poroshenko in a bind. The conflict with Russia has killed about 10,000 people, and Poroshenko knows that many Ukrainians would denounce any move to shift the rest of the country toward Europe by simply accepting the independence of Ukraine's breakaway provinces as a surrender to Russia.

Russia wants to ensure that Ukraine remains within its orbit, because the loss of Ukraine to the West would be the final indignity in a chain of post--Cold War humiliations. Still, Russia can't invade the rest of Ukraine, because major Russian losses might well undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin's support at home. The cost of occupying Ukraine, a nation of about 42 million people, is also far beyond Russia's means. Instead, Putin has kept Ukraine unstable to force its government to give the breakaway provinces--and, by extension, the Kremlin--a veto over Ukraine's national foreign and trade policies.

Many elected Western officials want to defend Ukraine from Russian manipulation, but they don't want to bear the costs of defending a country their citizens don't care about.

The stalemate is also becoming more expensive for both Russia and Ukraine. The blockade could shave another 1.3 percentage points off Ukraine's beleaguered economy. On the Russian side, poor prospects for oil prices will force the Kremlin to think hard about the wisdom of investing large sums in Ukraine's breakaway provinces for the indefinite future.

Something's got to give, but it has never been less clear what that might be.

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Kiev and the Kremlin Face Narrowing Options In Ukraine - TIME

Today Russia poses the greatest threat to the security and unity of Europe since 1945. Pro-Russian forces move towards Donetsk , eastern Ukraine, in November 2014. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov/AP

Over the past decade Europe has sleepwalked into an increasingly precarious and less safe place. The postwar order that provided so much peace and stability across the continent appears to be breaking up.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, as much as rejoiced in this at the recent Munich security conference when he spoke of the a new post-west era in Europe. Reversing the breakup of the Soviet Union and restoring the Russian empire have now become an obsession for the Kremlin. There are three things central to understanding what motivates Russia, and how Vladimir Putins government works.

The first is Russkiy mir Russian world: a philosophy that harks back to the Soviet era. Central to it is the belief that Ukraine is part of a greater Russia. In 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia was too weak to resist when more than 92% of my fellow Ukrainians voted for an independence we had hungered for over centuries. Gradually, however post-Soviet Russia has sought to exert its influence over my country, and when in 2014 a popular revolution ousted Viktor Yanukovych, it was more than Russia could stomach.

It subsequently illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in support of the so-called Peoples Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, which my government believes to be little more than a mixture of terrorist and criminal organisations.

Russias appetite for hegemony does not stop with Ukraine. It greedily eyes other former states and satellites of the Soviet Union, and more broadly seeks to destabilise and divide the rest of Europe and the wider transatlantic alliance. It is instructive that the Kremlin is commissioning new statues of Stalin, one of the 20th centurys worst mass murderers.

Second, hybrid warfare is a term that will be unfamiliar to most. It was developed and brought to new heights by the Kremlin, and unveiled to the world with the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the east of my country. Military aggression was accompanied by carefully planned propaganda and the orchestration of sham elections to support the Russian version of reality. Like old-style propaganda it uses pernicious lies to support the Kremlins cause, but it is more sophisticated and insidious than the old Soviet propagandists could ever have dreamed of.

This sort of warfare makes full use of modern technology, and is waged across the globe by the well-funded TV station Russia Today, or RT, with its benign call to Question More. What they want questioned is the established order. To this end RT deploys well-paid stooges from both the right and left of the political spectrum. They do not carry a coherent Russian narrative they simply seek to undermine that of the west.

Hybrid warfare goes further than TV and the internet. From the top of the Kremlin to thousands of keyboard jockeys in troll factories outside St Petersburg or Moscow, who drip their poison across social media, Russia lies on an industrial scale. It is a sophisticated strategy, sometimes combined with conventional aggression, sometimes not, but always serving Russian geopolitical interests.

Third, Russia cannot be trusted. The Ukraine government is fundamentally different, but we understand the mindset of the Kremlin leadership: Russia, as any diplomat who has dealt with the Kremlin will tell you, respects only power and should only be negotiated with from a position of strength and international solidarity.

Russia exploits weakness. It does this in bilateral negotiations just as it surely as it exploits the weakness of the UN security council, where it abuses its right of veto as one of five permanent members.

There can be no talk of lifting sanctions. They hurt Russia more than the Kremlin cares to admit

Russia also breaks its promises. Few in my country could have envisaged the consequences when in 1994 Ukraine gave up the worlds third largest nuclear arsenal, under guarantees protecting its territorial integrity from the UK, US and Russia. By annexing Crimea and invading Donbas Russia has spat on that historic document, the Budapest memorandum, which Ukraine signed up to in good faith to make the world a safer place. And 20 years on, Russia has not honoured a single clause of the Minsk agreement that they signed in an effort to bring about a resolution to the war in Donbas, in which 10,000 of our people have been killed and 23,000 wounded.

Today Russia poses the greatest threat to the security and unity of Europe since 1945. There can be no talk of lifting sanctions until Russia is brought to heel and persuaded to comply with international rules. And sanctions hurt Russia more than the Kremlin cares to admit. They are slowly reducing Russias ability to destabilise Europe and the world.

The west must remain united in the face of the threat, and must not blink first. Remember what that great Briton, Winston Churchill, said about appeasers: they are the ones who feed crocodiles, hoping they will be eaten last.

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Putin's desire for a new Russian empire won't stop with Ukraine - The Guardian

AVDIYIVKA/KIEV Ukrainian government troops and separatist fighters have drawn closer to each other at several places along the tense front line in eastern Ukraine, monitors say, raising the risk of violent flare-ups that could wreck a shaky ceasefire.

At some points, the sides have drawn within shouting distance of each other.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors a ceasefire agreed in the Belarus capital Minsk in 2015, says such advances violate the spirit of the accord.

Alexander Hug, deputy head of the OSCE mission, said its monitors struggle to verify if the accord is being respected because both sides refuse to disclose their units' locations and limit access to their positions.

"There is only one reason why the sides restrict us, it's because they do not want us to see what they are doing," he said.

With the two forces so close, the slightest movement on one side can provoke the other side into a violent reaction -- a scenario that caused one of the deadliest flare-ups of fighting in two years at the end of January.

The three-year-old conflict has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced 1.6 million and brought relations between Russia and the West to a level of hostility unseen since the Cold War. Pro-Russian separatists control a swathe of eastern Ukraine that they seized in 2014.

The inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has not joined in the public criticism of Russia shared by his predecessor and European leaders, has added to uncertainty, giving both sides reasons to test whether the truce will hold. But Western diplomats say the sides also share an interest in preventing a full-scale escalation into renewed war.

OSCE monitors say there is a risk of further flare-ups because forces loyal to Ukraine's government and the separatists are within such dangerous proximity.

"The Minsk agreements didn't say you can move up to the line and stand on each other's toes," said Hug. "As long as these root causes are not dealt with ... then a renewed escalation is just a matter of time."

He said the arrival of spring made it harder for monitors to verify the location of positions, because snow makes it easier to spot fresh fortifications from the ground or with drones.

FLARE-UP

The flare-up in the town of Avdiyivka earlier this year, which began a week after Trump's inauguration, showed how easily new fighting can be provoked.

Intense shelling during the week-long escalation around the government-controlled town killed more than 40 soldiers, civilians and rebel fighters. Civilians were trapped with no heat in bitter cold after shelling halted a power station.

Both sides blamed the other for causing the fighting, and described it at the time as an attempt to test the new Trump administration by provoking clashes.

Before the worst of the fighting started in Avdiyivka, the OSCE said one of its drones had spotted a Ukrainian military position being constructed in the no-man's-land, closer to separatist forces than previous Ukrainian positions.

Ukrainian officials acknowledge that some of their troops had moved forward, but said the separatists responded by opening fire with heavy artillery unprovoked. Moscow and the rebels accused Kiev of staging an advance into separatist territory.

The U.S. government, including state department officials held over from the outgoing Obama administration, largely backed the Ukrainian position, blaming "Russian aggression" for the fighting.

A Ukrainian defense ministry source said Ukrainian forces had not intended to provoke combat, but had moved forward as part of a strategy of strengthening positions in a "grey zone" between the sides. He acknowledged Ukraine was moving some positions forward elsewhere as well.

"Over the past three to four months, Ukraine has very slowly, gradually been moving forward to take up positions in the grey zone," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "If earlier the distance between our positions was 5-7 kilometers (3-4 miles), then today in many places it's 150 meters," he said.

The Ukrainians say the rebels have also moved forward. Rebels deny this.

This information is not true. Were not permitted to move ahead, its forbidden by the agreements," said senior separatist official Eduard Basurin, who acknowledged that the rebels used heavy weapons during the surge in fighting.

"We were forced to use heavy weapons in January-February, when there was shelling on Donetsk and Makiyivka. The OSCE knows about this. We were forced. It was a question of the security of the civilian population."

Hug named five points on the front line most at risk of future clashes, including the area around Avdiyivka, nearby Horlivka and territory east of the government-held port city of Mariupol. These tallied with places where the Ukrainian defense official also described opposing forces drawing closer together.

In Avdiyivka, although the flare-up has passed, sporadic shelling still breaks out.

For the thousands of civilians living in the crossfire, the fighting often starts without warning, forcing many to take shelter in basements to escape the shelling that gouges holes out of apartment blocks and severs power and water supplies.

"Nobody knows who fires first and it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that we just want to get on with life here," 65-year-old Avdiyivka resident Mikhail said, declining to give his surname like others in the frontline town.

(Additional reporting by Anton Zverev; Editing by Peter Graff)

PARIS The frontrunner in France's presidential election, Emmanuel Macron, received yet another boost to his candidacy on Sunday when nine lawmakers from a center-right party allied with conservative rival Francois Fillon decided to rally behind him.

ROME Europeans must contain their squabbling and carping about the EU if the Union is to survive, leaders warned on Saturday as they marked the 60th anniversary of its founding in Rome by signing a formal declaration of unity.

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In eastern Ukraine, troops tiptoeing up to front line risk heavy battles - Reuters

A federal control board overseeing Puerto Rico's finances amid a dire economic crisis announced Thursday that it appointed Ukraine's former finance minister as its executive director.

The board's chairman said Natalie Jaresko served during a critical time in Ukraine's history from 2014 to 2016 as it faced a deep recession.

"Ukraine's situation three years ago, like Puerto Rico's today, was near catastrophic, but she worked with stakeholders to bring needed reforms that restored confidence, economic vitality and reinvestment in the country and its citizens. That's exactly what Puerto Rico needs today," said chairman Jose Carrion.

He said Jaresko was born in Chicago to Ukrainian immigrantsand was chosen out of a group more than 300 candidates during a four-month search. She previously worked in various economic positions at the U.S. State Department and also co-founded private equity fund manager Horizon Capital, where she served as CEO. As Ukraine's finance minister, she maintained a strong reputation with Western governments and investors and helped negotiate a deal to restructure the country's $15 billion debt after its economy contract by nearly 18 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

Jaresko, 51, grew up in west suburban Wood Dale, and later moved to Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood.

Even as she spoke mostly English at home, her parents insisted that their children attend Ukrainian Saturday school and Ukrainian Orthodox church on Sunday.

"Monday through Friday, we were very American. On Saturday and Sunday, we were very Ukrainian, between Ukrainian school, seeing our grandparents and going to church," Jaresko told the Tribune in 2015.

She showed an inclination for political engagement from a young age. As a 21-year-old accounting major at DePaul University in 1986, she organized a vigil at Daley Plaza days after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine. The event, which she emceed, attracted 500 people, including more than 20 bishops, priests and ministers.

Jaresko said in a statement that she will pursue a decisive and successful recovery for Puerto Rico.

"I realize this goal may seem daunting if not impossible to many, but I accepted this position because I am optimistic we can achieve it together," she said.

Jaresko will be paid $625,000 a year, an amount Carrion acknowledged would likely cause an outcry on an island mired in a decade-long economic slump and seeking to restructure some $70 billion in public debt. He said Jaresko will commute from Ukraine once a month until June, with all flights and hotel stays to be paid for by Puerto Rico's government.

Carrion said Jaresko will be responsible for ensuring that Puerto Rico achieves a balanced budget within four years and is granted re-entry into the capital market after credit rating agencies downgraded the island's debt to junk status.

"She dealt with an extremely challenging economic situation that is very, very similar to the situation she's confronting in Puerto Rico," Carrion told reporters during a conference call.

He said Jaresko also will make sure that federal funds slated for Puerto Rico are administered correctly: "We have a credibility problem in Washington," he said.

The board was created last year by U.S. Congress and recently approved a 10-year fiscal plan for Puerto Rico that contains numerous austerity measures.

The Tribune's Kathy Bergen contributed

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Ex-Ukrainian finance minister, originally from Chicago, to oversee Puerto Rico economic crisis - Chicago Tribune