Robert Legvold is a Marshall D Shulman Professor Emeritus at the Columbia University political science department. He is one of the world's leading experts on the foreign policy of post-Soviet states, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine.

On September 8, 2015, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma arrived in Minsk. He travelled to the Belarusian capital, as Ukraine's representative to the Trilateral Contact Group that seeks to end the conflict in Donbas.

Since December 2014 Azov members have worked to transform the abandoned factory into a base where they could live, train and help the Ukrainian military.

The recent violence in Kyiv in connection with protests over Ukrainian parliamentary consideration of some sort of special status for the separatist part of the Donbas is unforgivable. But Minsk II, the hastily cobbled together peace treaty engineered by Germany and France under Russian pressure, is no less forgivable for having placed Ukraine in a near impossible situation.

The houses in the center of town had just been given fresh, clean plastic siding to impress foreign visitors for UEFA 2012, a soccer championship. Proud locals directed tourists to the gleaming new stadium where Donetsk Shakhtar played.