Russia’s TV 5 has shown an animated version of how Russian soldiers and equipment can reach Poland within a day, walk into a number of neighbouring countries, and could also go for Germany, it being a good while since “our” soldiers were there.

In the latest example of Russia’s dangerously broad anti-extremism legislation, the director of a Feodosiya library, now under Russian occupation, has been fined for holding books about the Ukrainian Holodomor, or manmade Famine of 1932/33

One year ago today two Maidan activists - Serhiy Nihoyan and Mikhail Zhyznevsky - were shot and killed on Hrushevsky St in Kyiv. On that same January 22 - Ukrainian Unity Day - Roman Senyk received fatal injuries, dying several days later, and Yury Verbytsky was left to die in a forest after being subjected to horrific torture. Nobody has been held to answer for any of these deaths.

The President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE] has asked Russia’s State Duma Speaker for help in securing Nadiya Savchenko’s urgent release. The imprisoned former pilot, Ukrainian MP and PACE delegate has been on hunger strike for 39 days and has rejected even her sister’s call for her to end it

Failure to officially acknowledge what Ukrainians have been living with since the Spring of 2014 can only arouse distrust and questions about who benefits by not declaring a state of war in which Russia, not isolated ‘terrorists’, is the main aggressor.

Edem Osmanov whose father earned fame and gratitude last December when he cooked pilaf for freezing EuroMaidan protesters has become the fifth Crimean Tatar to be facing dubious charges over the peaceful protest on May 3 when veteran Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemiliev was prevented from entering his homeland.

Petro Fedchuk, ex-deputy head of the Kyiv Police on the run from prosecution for the violent dispersal of peaceful Maidan protesters may now be providing the same services to the Russian police. While others are also continuing to evade justice, some former Berkut officers are fighting side by side with Maidan activists defending Ukraine

While those targeted were very probably ‘pro-Ukrainian’, possibly members of ‘Right Sector’, the Interior Minister’s adviser Anton Herashchenko and the Security Council seen worryingly quick to attribute blame

The Committee against Torture has recently expressed outrage over Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s threats (unfortunately implemented) to banish the relatives of alleged militants and destroy their homes. This is not the first clear link with a similar move made against an NGO reporting on Russian soldiers fighting and dying in Ukraine.

Public concern over Russia’s imprisonment of former military pilot and Ukrainian MP, Nadiya Savchenko has had impact. Every one of us can help ensure that this case, and that of Oleg Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko and Yury Yatsenko are kept in the public eye until they are all released. Please share, tweet (#FreeSavchenko) and force Russia to comply with the Minsk Protocol and international law

Just like after the downing of the Malaysian airliner in July, Kremlin-backed militants and the Russian media are in overdrive with multiple versions all aimed at denying responsibility for the shelling of a passenger bus near Volnovakha and death of at least 13 civilians

Concern is high over a bill proposed by the President’s Administration which critics believe would in fact give Ukraine’s president even more power than that assumed by Viktor Yanukovych during his four years as head of state

Dozens of laws and normative acts that restrict the rights of people in the Crimea, and five super-dangerous laws. These were the findings made public by the Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights following close monitoring of the first nine months since Russia annexed the Crimea in March 2014.

The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group [KHPG], together with the German NGO ‘European Exchange’ and representatives of NGOs from the Russian Federation and Germany with the support of the German Foreign Ministry, carried out an international mission to monitor human rights in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on territory which is back under Ukrainian control.

The good news is excellent, the bad – simply surreal. While the two engineers in detention for over two years on bizarre spying charges have finally been released, the professor whose book sparked off the whole ‘case’ is still charged with spying. He is accused of disclosing ’state secrets’ in a textbook where all the relevant information was taken from the Internet.

Immense relief for the 150 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians released by the Kremlin-backed militants is marred by ongoing concern for the minimum 534 people still in captivity, many ‘arrested’ on the basis of ‘denunciations’ like those in the worst Soviet times.

Gleb Yakunin, priest, defender of freedom of conscience and other human rights, former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, has died in Moscow. He was 80

In a case supported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Group’s Strategic Litigation Fund, the European Court of Human Rights has unanimously found that Ukraine violated an inmate’s rights through the substandard conditions in which he was held and lack of proper medical care, as well as through his initially unregistered detention

The Kharkiv City Council has yet again applied to the court for a ban on a protest action in the centre of the city, and a Kharkiv court has once again obliged. The reason given was one commonly used for the nearly wholesale bans on demonstrations during Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency

Oleksiy Svyetikov, head of the Luhansk Regional Branch of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine [CVU] paints a grim picture of the situation in the Luhansk oblast and is blunt in rejecting the Human Rights Watch definition of events as ’internal conflict’