Russia to redeploy early warning radar in Crimea

Russia’s Space Forces are to modernize and again use an old radar station in Sevastopol, Crimea, part of Russia's missile attack warning system until 2009.

The station to be fully operational and providing data to the Russian military in 2016, Space Forces commander Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Golovko announced on Saturday. He added that the station requires an upgrade of several engineering systems and brand new computer equipment.

The Dnepr early warning radar in Sevastopol was built in 1968 and was used to monitor the Black Sea, Southern and Central Europe and parts of the Middle East. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it was transferred to Ukrainian sovereignty and continued to provide data for the Russian military under lease.

In 2009, Russia canceled the deal, which cost some $1.3 million annually, because its coverage could be substituted by a new Voronezh radar station in Russia's Armavir. Ukraine has since used the Sevastopol facility for its civilian space agency.

The Russian military considered a possible redeployment of the station as early as July, according to sources cited by news agencies at the time. The cost of modernization was estimated relatively low compared to building a new station from scratch, while its good geographic location compensated the age of the facility.

The Space Forces will also have other new assets in the formerly Ukrainian region, which succeeded in the wake of the February armed coup in Kiev and voted to reunite with Russia. Starting December this year the military service will deploy two communication stations in Sevastopol and Evpatoria, which “will provide a significant benefit to the control of the orbital constellation,” Golovko said.

Dnepr early warning radar is the later modification of the first generation of the Soviet systems of this kind. NATO reporting name for the entire range is Hen House. It can detect missile launches at ranges of up to 3,000km. The second generation of Russian early warning radar is called Daryal (NATO reporting name Pechora).

Voronezh radar is the current third generation with a range of 4,200km, lower energy consumption and less personnel required. A station of this kind can be deployed in 12 to 18 months as compared to five to nine years for Dnepr, thanks to module design.

Elsewhere in Russia, the Space Forces expect to have two additional early warning stations operational by year's end, the general said. One Voronezh station is located in the western enclave of Kaliningrad region and the other one in Irkutsk Region in southwestern Siberia.

“Before year's end these stations will commence their combat missions of radar control of western and eastern missile attack threat directions,” Golovko said.

Two additional Voronezh stations are to start trial operation in Siberian Altay Region and Krasnoyarsk Region this year.

The general's report was part of celebration of the anniversary of the first space launch in human history. The Sputnik-1 satellite was launched on October 4, 1957, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.

Source: Russia Today 04-10-2014

Ukrainian big business tycoon may face expulsion from European Jewish organizations

Russian-Israeli politician and journalist Avigdor Eskin has begun a sign-up campaign to collect the signatures of religious figures of authority

MOSCOW, October 4. /TASS/. Russian-Israeli politician and journalist Avigdor Eskin has declared he is beginning a sign-up campaign to collect the signatures of religious figures of authority to an appeal addressed to the European Jewish Parliament and the European Jewish Union demanding the expulsion of Ukrainian big business tycoon Igor Kolomoisky. 

“It would be just fair if the Jewish community stripped him of all posts and expelled him from its organizations. For this we shall address them together with those whom they cannot but listen to. It is intolerable that our coreligionist gives money to people wearing chevrons with swastikas,” Eskin told the daily Izvestia.

He believes that the Jewish organizations in Europe, Russia and Israel should pay more attention to events in Ukraine.

Kolomoisky is the founder of the financial-industrial group Privat and governor of Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk Region. The battalions on his payroll are suspected of killings of civilians in the south-east of Ukraine. Last June Russia’s Investigative Committee put Kolomoisky on the international wanted list on charges of masterminding murder, using prohibited means and methods of warfare, impairing the activity of journalists, and abductions.

Izvestia says that Kolomoisky is a member of a number of Jewish organizations and even leads some of them, such as the European Jewish Union. The election was held about five years ago, when the Ukrainian tycoon had not financed extremist organizations yet.

A member of the European Jewish Parliament, Igor Dabakarov, supports Eskin in his initiative and is prepared to press for Kolomoisky’s expulsion from the EJU leadership.

“I am one of the initiators of this message, and I believe that such people as Kolomoisky have no right to lead such communities. At the forthcoming meeting of the European Jewish Parliament I shall certainly raise the question of his removal from that post and of his expulsion. The representatives from the CIS countries share our position,” Izvestia quotes Dabakarov as saying.

The deputy president of the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia, Rabbi Zinovy Kogan, believes it will be utterly impermissible to associate Kolomoisky’s name with the Jewish people. “We have our own rascals, just as any other people. Kolomoisky is precisely such a type,” Kogan said.
The collapse of traditional values in Ukraine has brought about chaos and conditions for the emergence of real neo-Nazism, he added.

A Moscow synagogue rabbi, Isaac Kogan, has remarked that “the swastika and the Jewish way of life are incompatible."

“The things I see in Ukraine these days - swastikas on the chevrons of Kolomoisky’s battalions - are certainly incompatible with Ukraine’s future,” he said.

At the end of September and the beginning of October the world remembers the victims of Nazi war crimes at Babi Yar in Kiev. The Babi Yar ravine in 1941 was a scene of mass executions of civilians, mostly Jews, and also Soviet prisoners of war.

Source: ITAR-TASS 04-10-2014

Swiss Red Cross worker killed in shelling from Kiev-controlled position – Moscow

The Swiss Red Cross worker, who died in Donetsk shelling on Thursday, was killed on a rebel-held territory as a result of an attack from the position controlled by Kiev’s armed forces, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“We note the hectic reaction of the Kiev authorities, who hurried to shift the blame for the death of the employee of this established international organization [Red Cross] from themselves,” the ministry said.

“Kiev doesn’t want to admit the obvious fact that while the [attacked] area in Donetsk was situated on territory controlled by the militia forces, the shelling itself was conducted from Ukrainian Army positions.”

Moscow condemned the incident as “a blatant violation” of international humanitarian law and insisted on an objective and thorough investigation into the matter.

Laurent DuPasquier, a Swiss employee of International Red Cross Committee (IRCC), was killed on Thursday in shelling which was carried out allegedly from an Uragan (Hurricane) rocket system, a report by the OSCE said.
The document also stated that 15 minutes after the shelling, the OSCE observers got a phone call from the head of the IRCC in Kiev, who told them that the Donetsk office was under attack, and one of the employees was dead. He had been standing in front of the building when the shelling began.

Earlier on Friday, First Deputy Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic Andrey Purgin also claimed that the rocket that hit the Red Cross office was launched by the Ukrainian military.

“There’s no question about that. This was a rocket projectile of the Uragan system. It was, of course, launched by the Ukrainian side. Its range is up to 40km. That is to say they were shelling the center of Donetsk, without paying any attention to the location they were to hit. It just happened that it hit the Red Cross office,” Purgin said.

Source: Russia Today 03-10-2014

Ukrainian troops besieged in Donetsk airport shelling residential houses

On Thursday evening Donetsk came under the most intense shelling over the recent days

DONETSK, October 2. /TASS/. A block of flats in the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine came under mortar shelling from Ukrainian troops besieged in the airport on the city outskirts, the press service of Interior Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic told Tass on Thursday.

“We can confirm that a mortar hit a nine-storey block of flats in Universitetskaya Street,” the press service said adding that casualties have been reported.

A Tass correspondent said in a dispatch on the spot that on Thursday evening Donetsk came under the most intense shelling over the recent days and explosions were heard even in the city center.

A source familiar with the situation told Tass that Ukrainian military and Donetsk People’s Republic militia fighters are still fighting for the airport.

On Wednesday, the press service of the Donetsk city council said nine people were killed as a result of a shellings attack. In particular, three people - the biology teacher and two parents - died when school No. 57 came under fire; five people received fragmentation wounds.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the increased violence in Ukraine in the past few days. 

Armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and the peace plan

Clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions have claimed some 3,500 lives, according to the UN, and forced hundreds of thousands to flee Ukraine’s war-torn east.

Talks mediated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on September 5 in Minsk saw the parties to the Ukrainian conflict agree on cessation of fire and exchange of prisoners. The ceasefire took effect the same day but reports said it has occasionally been violated.

On September 20 in Minsk, the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine comprising representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE adopted a memorandum outlining the parameters for the implementation of commitments on the ceasefire in Ukraine laid down in the Minsk Protocol of September 5.

Source: ITAR-TASS 02-10-2014

Strong proof Right Sector, National Guard linked to mass graves near Donetsk – Moscow

There is irrefutable evidence that the National Guard and ultra-nationalist Right Sector fighters are responsible for the murder of people recently discovered in mass burial sites near Donetsk, eastern Ukraine said Russia’s Investigative Committee.

“For those who have doubts regarding who’s responsible for these murders, the Investigative Committee has irrefutable evidence - witness accounts and appropriate examinations – that directly indicates that this crime was committed by fighters from the National Guard and Right Sector,” the committee’s head Vladimir Markin in a statement on Wednesday.

The mass graves discovered in September near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine “are further eloquent testimony to the atrocities of the Ukrainian nationalists,” Markin said, adding that “all of the victims were tortured before their murder."

The murders were described in detail in the testimony of a soldier from the ‘Dnepr’ battalion, Sergey Litvinov, detained in a Russian hospital as a civilian after he fled Ukraine, Markin said. Currently Litvinov is under arrest and is to be transferred to Moscow for further questioning, he added.

Litvinov “personally killed civilians not involved in the military conflict, including women and children residents of the villages Melovoye, Shiroky, Makarovo and Kamushnoye, guided by anonymous denunciations,” Markin said, quoting the soldier’s testimony.

“What is more interesting that this fighter received a money reward for the killings from his leadership sponsored by Igor Kolomoysky,” Markin said, referring the Kiev-appointed Dnepropetrovsk governor and prominent oligarch.
“We know the names of many of the commanders of military units, the militants of the Right Sector and the National Guard, who carry out criminal orders of the military and political leadership of Ukraine,” Markin said, adding that all of them will sooner or later have to answer “not only before the law, but also to their own conscience.”

READ MORE:‘Taped hands, gun wounds’: RT witnesses exhumation of mass graves in E. Ukraine

In the Wednesday statement the spokesman of the Investigative Committee stressed that all information and evidence of the crimes is provided by direct witnesses, primarily refugees who fled the region of military operations.

There are over 300,000 refugees who fled to Russia, according to Markin. Over 60,000 were questioned and 12,000 of them were confirmed to be victims, he added.

“In addition to eyewitness accounts, many victims have provided evidence to the Russian Investigative Committee and evidence in the form of soil samples, genetic material. These samples were thoroughly examined, confirming the testimony of witnesses and victims themselves.”

Markin slammed Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office for failing to carry out its own investigation.
“What prevented andis preventing them now from conducting their own investigation into the massacres of the civilian population and to try to protect the innocent population of Donbass instead of makinghysterical statements about the alleged ‘interference’ in the affairs of a sovereign republic?” he questioned.

The discovery of the graves was made on September 23 by self-defense forces, who were responding to information given to them by locals, who said that they had been dug by Ukrainian government forces. The OSCE confirmed the finding on September 25 and reported its concerns to the European Union. 

Source: Russia Today 01-10-2014