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KIEV A Ukrainian lawmaker kidnapped in the southern city of Odessa earlier on Thursday has been found unharmed and his attackers have been detained, the local prosecutor's office said.

Earlier, the head of President Petro Poroshenko's BPP faction, Ihor Hryniv, told parliament that MP Oleksiy Honcharenko had been kidnapped "in broad daylight" in his native Odessa.

"The criminal group has been neutralized. Honcharenko is in a safe place," said Inna Verba, a spokeswoman for the Odessa prosecutor's office.

Thirty-six-year-old Honcharenko used to be in the pro-Russian Party of Regions, but joined Poroshenko's faction following the 'Maidan' uprising in 2014, becoming a vocal opponent of the Russia-backed separatist movement in eastern Ukraine.

Speaking to Reuters by phone, Verba said Honcharenko had been targeted because of his political position, but did not give further details on the alleged motive.

"They wanted to burn his eyes with acid and break his knees so that he suffered. They didn't plan to kill him," she said.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

BEIRUT/ISTANBUL An Islamic State car bomb killed more than 50 people on Friday in a Syrian village held by rebels, a war monitor said, a day after the jihadist group was driven from its last stronghold in the area.

DAKAR Funds from a dollar bank account in the name of the Jammeh Foundation for Peace, a charity founded by Gambia's former president Yahya Jammeh, flowed to Jammeh himself, not to foundation projects, according to bank records and interviews with a former charity official and a former presidential staff member.

MANILA A Philippine senator and staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs was in police custody on Friday following her high-profile arrest for drugs offences that she described as a vendetta that would fail to silence her.

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Kidnapped Ukrainian MP found unharmed, attackers detained: prosecutor - Reuters

A day after the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) warned the ceasefire had failed, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel urged Kiev and Moscow to hold fast to the agreement.

Despite assurances given by both parties, he said, the "ceasefire is not holding."

"We can only urgently appeal to both sides to implement the agreements we have reached -- otherwise, we will risk an intensified military escalation with many other civilian victims and a continuation of the standstill in the political process," Gabriel said in a statement.

"Even the most intense negotiating efforts are in vain when there is no political will to implement them."

Both sides had agreed to the withdrawal of "heavy weapons and full compliance" with the ceasefire, which was supposed to start Monday, Gabriel said.

Speaking Tuesday at the headquarters of the United Nations, OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier revealed there had been "no signs of the withdrawal of the weapons."

"The crisis in and around the Ukraine continues to be a major source of tension and instability in Europe," he said.

Zannier had been invited by the Ukraine delegation of the Security Council to speak before the chamber.

He told the Security Council that the OSCE was "monitoring the ceasefire and are ready to observe the much-needed withdrawal of heavy weapons."

Zannier told reporters that there continued to be a number of violations and that the impact on civilians in the disputed regions was becoming "increasingly significant."

"We will need to keep pushing and activate the international community also to put pressure on the sides to implement" steps to ensure the ceasefire holds.

His appearance came just before the organization's principle deputy chief monitor told CNN that there were about 200 ceasefire violations overnight Tuesday local time. The number is in addition to hundreds more observed since the ceasefire nominally began Monday.

Alexander Hug, principle deputy chief monitor of the OSCE's special monitoring mission to Ukraine, told CNN's Clare Sebastian that about 100 of those violations were explosions, indicating that heavy weaponry, such as tanks and mortars, is still in place.

Unlike the last few weeks, when critical infrastructure was cut off, there is no immediate crisis as of now, but any of these explosions could knock out a power line and make things worse, Hug added.

Zannier said relations between the West and Russia remain "strongly adversarial" and that "in Europe, we increasingly see the impact of an approach to the post-Cold War phase (of cooperation) with a Cold War mentality."

Zannier said there was a "very real risk of escalation" in fighting in the region and that Russian President Vladimir Putin's executive order to recognize travel documents from the de facto, pro-Russian separatist authorities in disputed areas of eastern Ukraine "complicates the implementation of the Minsk agreement."

Putin effectively withdrew from the Minsk agreement last week by signing an executive order recognizing travel documents issued by separatist authorities in the region.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Russia is recognizing the travel documents "for humanitarian reasons."

But at a Security Council briefing Wednesday, the Ukrainian delegation said Russia isn't fully living up to its end of the deal.

"Instead of full and good-faith implementation of the Minsk commitments, Russia resorts to political and military provocations, blackmail and political pressure," the delegation said in a statement.

In addition, Ukraine said, the Trilateral Contact Group -- representatives of Ukraine, Russia and OSCE -- "should pay particular attention to achieving immediate and unconditional release of Ukrainian citizens, who remain illegally detained as hostages or political prisoners in the occupied areas of Donbas and in Crimea, as well as in the Russian Federation."

The Minsk agreement, which was negotiated in 2014 but never fully implemented, calls for the "bilateral cessation of the use of all weapons," and the decentralization of power in the region "with respect to the temporary status of local self-government in certain areas of the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions."

At the time, then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk spoke of the deal with guarded optimism.

"We had just two options: bad, and worse," he said. "So we decided at this particular period of time to get the bad option. Probably this option will save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers, and I hope this option will save lives of Ukrainian civilians, of innocent people, who are under a constant shelling of Russian-led terrorists."

"It's better to have this new deal rather than not to have (it)," he said. "But we do not trust any words or any papers. We are to trust only actions and deeds."

CNN's Richard Roth contributed to this report.

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Ukraine ceasefire: No sign of weapons withdrawal, official says - CNN

The Ukrainian term Holodomor has yet to enter the worlds genocide vocabulary, as Shoah and Cambodia and Rwanda have done. But we should hope that the world soon becomes as familiar with the Holodomor as it has with the Holocaust: not for the sake of a comparative wickedness contest and still less to deny the singular character of Hitlers Final Solution, but to honor the victims of one of the most pitiless exterminations of a population in history and to take from their awful fate some important lessons for the future.

Starvation is a terrible way to die, which is why the Nazis used the starvation bunker in Auschwitz I as a weapon against prisoner rebellion: Revolt, and you will die a slow, agonizing death, your humanity degraded to an animalistic level. Yet what happened in Cell 18, Block 11 of KL-Auschwitz to a few men at a time (including Saint Maximilian Kolbe) was deliberately inflicted on millions of Ukrainians in 193233 by the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. As with all such clandestine slaughters this one hidden with the connivance of such regime toadies as Walter Duranty of the New York Times, whose ill-gotten Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked there are disputes about the body count. The (very) low-end figure has 2.5 million Ukrainians starved as an act of Soviet state policy, while reputable demographic studies suggest that as many as 10 million innocents died in the Holodomor.

There was nothing accidental about the Ukrainian terror famine. While inadequate harvests played their part at the outset of the slaughter, the state policy was clear Ukraine was to be systematically depopulated by starvation as a means of reinforcing Soviet control over a population that had briefly tasted national freedom and independence in the post-Romanov, postWorld War I chaos following the breakup of the old Russian Empire. And while there was a Marxist-ideological element in this lethally systematic cruelty the kulaks or rich peasants were one target of Stalins policy it also seems clear that ethno-racism and atheistic passions played a significant role in the decision to starve millions to death. These Ukrainians were, after all, mere little brothers of the Great Russians, lower life forms who, in addition to their ethnic deficiencies, stubbornly clung to their faith, their icons, their sacraments, and their priests in the worlds first officially atheist state. That this policy of feed-the-Russians-first-by-starving-the-Ukrainians was ordered by a native Georgian (Stalin) was perhaps bitterly ironic; but then Stalin, the former czarist prisoner, was eager to confirm his position, not only as Lenins ideological heir, but as the father of the Great Russian fatherland which required him to deny the reality of Ukraines unique nationality and culture, and its formative role in the history of the eastern Slavs.

A recently released feature film, Bitter Harvest, tries to bring a human texture and a certain comprehensibility to this almost incomprehensible tale of systematic, state-sponsored mass starvation, telling the story of the worst period of the Holodomor (when some 30,000 Ukrainians starved to death every day) through the lives of two young lovers, one of whom is transformed from artist to anti-Soviet partisan in response to the horrors he sees as the starvation policy begins to take its human toll. The film, while perhaps not great cinema, succeeds in personalizing the Holodomor and reminding us that this genocide happened, literally, one person at a time, as an elderly peasant, a child, or a wife and mother each died from state-induced malnutrition and starvation, wasting away to nothingness while Soviet thugs blocked the borders of Ukraine to prevent their escape and ruthlessly expropriated (or destroyed) every possible foodstuff in order to bring Ukraine to heel. Those who want to honor the innocent dead by learning the story of the Holodomor in full would do well to read Robert Conquests pioneering study of the Ukrainian terror famine, Harvest of Sorrow, or the more recent Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. But for a mass audience, Bitter Harvest will, one hopes, do for the Holodomor what the 1978 television series Holocaust and Stephen Spielbergs film Schindlers List did for the Shoah: bring such hard-to-conceive awfulness home, making it real in microcosm.

That remembering is important in itself, as an act of solidarity with the dead. It is also important as America and the West consider their response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine that began three years ago this month. For while Putins war in eastern Ukraine has not taken anything close to the toll of the Holodomor, it has rung up a serious butchers bill: Ten thousand dead and 23,000 wounded, with 1.8 million internally displaced persons trying to rebuild their lives in other parts of Ukraine. And as Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty points out, this is not (as so many in supine, feckless, or mindless Western political circles seem to think) the Ukraine conflict. This is, as Whitmore puts it, a war on Ukraine, and it is a war of choice. So was the Holodomor.

Moreover, the 21st-century war on Ukraine is the result of one mans deliberate policy, as was the terror famine of the 1930s. Then the perpetrator was Stalin; today, the perpetrator is Vladimir Putin, who, it will be remembered, has not been loath to see a rehabilitation of Stalins memory and image in his new Russia. And it is not difficult to find a further parallel.

Stalins war on Ukraine was motivated in part by his insistence that Ukraine was not a national reality deserving of independence. Putin, for his part, has said that Ukraine isnt a real country. For men of power without consciences, it is a short step from saying that Ukraine is not a real country to ordering the murder of Ukrainians, in their thousands or their millions. And to what end? To secure the Soviet empire, then, or recreate it in 21st-century form, now.

That ought not be an option the West is prepared to tolerate, for obvious strategic reasons and in fidelity to its own professed ideals.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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Bitter Harvest and the Bitter Present in Ukraine - National Review

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort during RNC

Former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort quit Trumps campaignin Augustunder a cloud of suspicion, but it now appears that more than potential investigations may have been behind his departure. Manafortwas also being strong-armed by someone with inside knowledge ofunder-the-tablepayments and a secret meeting between Donald Trump and a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician.

The undated communications, which are allegedly from the iPhone of Manaforts daughter, include a text that appears to come from a Ukrainian parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, seeking to reach her father, in which he claims to have politically damaging information about both Manafort and Trump.

Attached to the text is a note to Paul Manafort referring to bulletproof evidence related to Manaforts financial arrangement with Ukraines former president, the pro-Russian strongman Viktor Yanukovych, as well as an alleged 2012 meeting between Trump and a close Yanukovych associate named Serhiy Tulub.

Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist,has claimed to have no connection to the texts, but whatever their source, the authorseemedto have advance knowledge of the investigation launched by Ukrainian officials into more than$12 million in off the books payments supposedly funneled to Manafort. These payments may have continued while Manafort was employed by Trump.

As for the meeting between Trump and Tulub

The White House did not respond to a question about whether Trump had met with Tulub, a hunting buddy of Yanukovychs who had served as part of government when Yanukovych was prime minister.

Serhiy Tulub is the former coal industry minister and head of the Cherkasy Regional State Administration, and a close associate of Yanukovych. Its unclear what reason he would have had for meeting with Donald Trump.

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Former Trump campaign chief blackmailed over meeting between Trump and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine - Daily Kos

On February 3 Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko launched the fiercest of his rhetorical attacks against Russiaa country that has been financially underpinning Lukashenkos regime. Despite the audacious comments of the Belarusian leader, there is little chance that his words will convince Moscow to continue providing support to his country with few strings attached. The status quo will likely be extended, which means there will constantly be a diminishing value for Russia. Thus, Lukashenkos options are few. Either he fully participates in Russias integration initiatives, or he sees his power collapsing. At this point, Moscow does not even have to make dramatic moves to rein in Lukashenko, since time is working against the Belarusian president.

Lukashenko spent several hours at his press conference listing the grievances committed by Russia. Minsk made several (mostly symbolic) moves aimed at escalating a showdown with Moscow, which included the extradition of travel blogger Alexander Lapshin, a Russian-Israeli dual citizen, to Azerbaijan. (Baku is persecuting Lapshin for visits to Nagorno-Karabakh.) Lukashenko recently skipped several summits held by various Moscow-oriented organizations about the post-Soviet space and the neverending soap opera surrounding the Russian military base in Belarus. Minsk and Russia were supposed to establish a Single Air Defence System, per a controversial treaty signed years ago. The establishment of that system has been delayed, and now observers have begun discussing the possibility that a full-blown crisis could explode between Moscow and Minsk. How will that crisis unfold?

The mathematics behind Russian-Belarusian relations during the last twenty years is simple. The numbers vary, but moderate estimates show that Belarus has received approximately $100 billion of various Russian investments, preferences and support. Russias return, on the other hand, is very limited. The country receives no significant profits from bilateral enterprises, and incurs billions of losses to its budget as a result of different schemes for importing foreign goods through Belarus. Belarusian kiwis and Spanish hambecame the source of jokes in Russia after Belarusian entrepreneurs started supplying Western fruits and gourmet food that had been banned in Russia under the label Made in Belarus.

Politically, the Union State of Russia and Belarus that was formed in December 1999 never fully materialized. Furthermore, despite the geopolitical showdown between Russia and the West, Lukashenko has always adopted cautious positions, and Minsk has conducted its foreign-policy negotiations independently from Moscow. For example, Belarus has never recognized South Ossetia or Abkhazia as independent states. Belarus has also prevented its citizens from volunteering to fight for the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics as a show of good will toward the new Ukrainian authorities.

At the same time, the Eurasian Economic Union, an international organization in the post-Soviet space, initiated and advanced by Russia, has been maturing. The main difference between the union and previous Russian projects is that the union is more structured. Additionally, it has clear plans and benchmarks for integration that are similar to those of the European Union. That structured integration has left little space for Lukashenkos omnipotence and temper. The disagreements and conflicts between Minsk and Moscow have continued to multiply. After 2014, against the background of Ukrainian turmoil and a geopolitical face-off with the West, Moscow became increasingly prudent in managing its resources, including its foreign-political resources. An audit of relations with all Russian allies was on the Kremlins agenda. Under such circumstances, it was of no surprise that Lukashenko found himself under growing pressure to follow Moscows script or to defend his position.

Lukashenko chose the latter. Moscow will make the next move. Some observers predict that this move could be a very powerful one and could potentially include the forced removal of Lukashenko. Still, such drastic measures do not seem necessary. Lets remember that, theoretically, Minsk could win a showdown with Moscow by turning from Russia to the West. However, it seems the Belarusian president passed the opportunity to make such a turn a long time ago.

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Why Belarus Can't Afford to Be the New Ukraine - The National Interest Online