The percentage of Ukrainians supporting independence has risen from 83% to a record 90%.

We join the International Committee for Crimea in extending very best wishes to Mustafa Dzhemilev , the renowned Crimean Tatar leader and former Soviet dissident.

The Vinnytsa Regional Police believe they have identified three young people - two 14-year olds and one 18-year-old - responsible for smashing 66 graves in the old Jewish cemetery

Freedom House’s 2013 Freedom in the World Report speaks of “noteworthy declines” in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some of Ukraine’s other post-Soviet neighbours presumably didn’t have far to fall.

One of the two young heroes of the harrowing film about illegal mines or “kopanki” in the Donbas region, “Pit No. 8, Yura Sykanov” is in urgent need of an operation

Many Happy Returns to Yevhen Zakharov who turned 60 on Monday and to the Kharkiv Human Rights Group which he co-founded 20 years ago.

During the night from 15 to 16 September, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust was desecrated. Those responsible daubed foul anti-Semitic words on the memorial stone.

In Dnipropetrovsk almost 2 million UAH of city funding has been spent on an artistic composition including bronze sculptures of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and former Ukrainain President Leonid Kuchma.

In the early hours of 1 July the Monument outside the town of Novomoskovsk 40 kilometres from Dnipropetrovsk was daubed with various symbols including a swastika

Sosonki Clearing near Rivne which holds the mass grave of seventeen and a half thousand Jews murdered by the Nazis has been vandalized

Maxim Shcherbatyuk, UHHRU lawyer, relates his travel (or otherwise) experiences following the statements Ukrzaliznytsya [Ukrainian Railways] made throughout the country on 10 February asserting unheard of progress in electronic ticket sales

On 14 January the Stus Prize was awarded in Kyiv to Yevhen Zakharov, Co-Chair of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, the poet Iryna Zhylenko and historian Volodymyr Vyatrovych.

In a Judgement passed on 13 December 2011, and made public on Thursday, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court rules that the languages of ethnic minorities may be used in Ukrainian courts, alongside the State language

"True nationhood can only come from the collective action of the people.. the current situation is a direct result of their over dependence on a corrupt and non democratic system that has been allowed to evolve in the interests of a select few"

However the percentage of those who said yes when asked whether Ukraine really was an independent country was less than the number who gave a negative answer (37.4% and 49.8% respectively). Last year the numbers were approximately equal (43.2% and 44.7%, respectively

The survey has been carried out over many years by the Institute of Sociology around the anniversary of Ukraine’s independence

Torrential rain has led to flooding of the exhibit hall of the National Museum in Memory of the Victims of Holodomor in Ukraine

The Hungarian community in the Transcarpathian region assert that the local department of the Security Service [SBU] is questioning people who have been to the Hungarian embassy trying to receive Hungarian citizenship.

In the light of all that is happening in these parts of the world, the UK’s National Union of Journalists and its members believe it “bizarre and inappropriate for the British government to axe essential parts of the BBC World Service”

In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s third Index of Democracy 2010, Ukraine shows the worst result of any European country, slipping 14 points (it held 53rd place in 2008 and is at 67 in 2010)