Ukrainians Of Buffalo & WNY

Parliamentary elections on July 21 are likely to put plenty of new faces in Ukraine's legislature. But some politicians say they're bracing for "revanche," warning that the return of figures from the Viktor Yanukovych era would risk a tilt toward Russia and a rollback of progress made after the Euromaidan protests that cast them out.

Follow all of the latest developments as they happen.

With three of its citizens facing murder charges as increasingly detailed information about how Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down, Russia is still casting it as a "crash" whose cause is a mystery -- a familiar tactic when Moscow's involvement in mayhem abroad and at home leads to tragedy.

After parliamentary elections on July 21, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will take a big trip abroad: to Washington. Zelenskiy shares a common background with Donald Trump, but can he win over a U.S. president who has made his desire for warmer relations with Russia clear?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office has proposed a prisoner exchange with Russia involving Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who is jailed in Russia, and Russian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky, who is in detention in Ukraine.

Kurt Volker, the special U.S. envoy to Ukraine, says Russia’s move to fast-track the granting of citizenship to all residents of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk runs counter to efforts to achieve peace in an armed conflict that is in its sixth year.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers dedicated to Ukrainian issues has introduced legislation to sanction members of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) over their roles in taking 24 Ukrainian crewmen captive last November near the Kerch Strait.

In a season of elections and political change in Ukraine, a cease-fire and troop pullback in the battle-scarred town of Stanytsya Luhanska show peace in the east is possible. But along the rest of the 400-kilometer-long front line, fighting has flared more than five years into a war that remains one of the major points of tension between Russia and the West.

The European Parliament has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on Russian authorities “to release without further delay and unconditionally all illegally and arbitrarily detained Ukrainian citizens both in Russia and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree expanding the simplified procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship for all residents of Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka photographed postwar estates across central and eastern Europe, finding strange, stark beauty in these concrete giants

• Eastern Blocks: Concrete Landscapes of the Former Eastern Bloc is published by Zupagrafika

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Dmytro Firtash, confidant of ousted Ukrainian president, faces bribery-related charges

Austria’s highest court has upheld a decision making it possible to extradite Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon facing bribery-related charges in the US.

Before his arrest in 2014, Firtash wielded significant political influence in Ukraine, where he had made a fortune from deals to import gas from Russia and central Asia and built a business empire worth billions. He was a close confidant of the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the Maidan revolution in February 2014.

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Delegation leaves Council of Europe assembly in protest at readmission of Russian MPs

The Ukrainian delegation at the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe has walked out in protest after Russian MPs were allowed to return to the human rights body five years after the annexation of Crimea.

The assembly backed Russia’s return by 118 votes to 62, in one of the first reversals of the penalties imposed on Moscow after its military entered Ukraine in 2014.

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