The strategy didn't work, because most Ukrainians resented the deal as a betrayal of national interests and its implementation has stalled.... In a fast-moving chain of events, rebel leaders announced massive evacuation in a video that was aired Friday but was recorded two days earlier, according to the data embedded in it — a sign of a pre-arranged plot.... He said sarcastically that Ukraine could be named after Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, who had handed over wide swathes of Russia’s histo

Gazing sternly east, the figure holds a 16-metre( 52-foot) sword in her right hand and an eight-metre-long shield in her left. Originally, the shield bore the Soviet Union's coat of arms-a crossed hammer and sickle surrounded by ears of wheat.... Ukraine outlawed Soviet symbols in 2015, the year after Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatist proxies in the country’s east.... Across Ukraine, hundreds of statues of Russian poets and Soviet generals were torn down or defaced, and public art an

Gazing sternly east, the figure holds a 16-metre( 52-foot) sword in her right hand and an eight-metre-long shield in her left. Originally, the shield bore the Soviet Union's coat of arms-a crossed hammer and sickle surrounded by ears of wheat.... Ukraine outlawed Soviet symbols in 2015, the year after Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatist proxies in the country’s east.... Across Ukraine, hundreds of statues of Russian poets and Soviet generals were torn down or defaced, and public art an

Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised the stakes in the Ukraine standoff by recognizing the independence of rebel regions in the country's east, and a key question now is whether he will stop at that or try to move deeper into Ukraine. Putin signaled his readiness to up the ante in an hourlong address to the nation that cast Ukraine as an artificial construct, a U.S.“ puppet ” that has “ robbed ” Russia of historical lands lost in the Soviet collapse.... But at the same time, the Russian