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Top news – only 3 days until Ukraine’s parliamentary election on Sunday, July 21:
- Relatives and friends commemorated the deaths of 298 passengers of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killed five years ago. Villagers of Hrabove, where the airliner was downed, honored the victims in a ceremony. Meanwhile, new witnesses contacted the Joint Investigation Team.
- The Security Service of Ukraine announced that a militant who organized the trailer carrying the missile that shot down MH17 had been captured two years ago and is now serving a sentence in Ukraine.
- The full scope of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine has been revealed in a new study of 4,000 leaked Kremlin emails. The ‘Surkov Leaks’, examined by the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute, show how Russia funds proxies to break up Ukraine’s unity, control the media and interfere in elections.
- Imprisoned Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov directed a new dystopian film via email while locked up in a Russian prison. The film, ‘Numbers’, slated for release in 2020, portrays a society of strict and absurd rules that everyone follows until a rebel disobeys.
- A Chornobyl ‘liquidator’ committed suicide after the HBO series dramatizing the disaster reminded him of the promises broken by the Soviet and Kazakh government.
- A Moscow court extended the custody of the 24 captured Ukrainian sailors for another three months, despite recent talks between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin about a possible prisoner swap.
- The first episode of Bellingcat’s new podcast about the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 is now available. Podcast guests described their experience in eastern Ukraine before the aircraft’s downing, which cost 298 civilian lives.
- Ukraine’s top state-owned hydropower company launched a new 46.8 megawatt turbine in Vyshgorod, north of Kyiv. In the next two years, two more turbines will be installed, which will help to avoid power outages and ensure a stable electricity supply to the capital.
- Independent Euro-Optimist lawmakers Sergii Leschenko and Svitlana Zalishchuk are running grass-roots campaigns for parliamentary re-election. See the video here.
- Vox Populi: Ukrainians weigh in on how they assess the work of Ukraine’s current parliament.
