The only way that U.S. President Barack Obama can win in Ukraine now is by negotiating subsequent details to become deal-breakers to the February 12th draft agreement, such that for Russian President Vladimir Putin not to accept Obama's proposed details would mean that no deal will be signed. This could happen, because the prestige of both leaders is on the line in this new draft deal on Ukraine.

The agreement is only basic principles, which can be found here. The announcement of the agreement opens as follows:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin; President of Ukraine, Peter Poroshenko; French President Francois Hollande; and Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Angela Merkel, confirmed full respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. They firmly believe in the inevitability of peaceful resolution."

U.S. President Barack Obama is not mentioned there; but, for him to reject their deal, and to send lethal weapons to Ukraine now and so escalate the war and its massive bloodshed — which has already cost "up to 50,000" dead and millions of refugees — would be extremely embarrassing for the United States: no American "boots on the ground," just tens of thousands of Ukrainian corpses under it, in a war that Obama himself had initiated (and even the founder of Stratfor, the "private CIA" firm, says that the February 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which started the war, was "the most blatant coup in history," which it certainly was, and is increasingly recognized as having been).

If, during coming days, Putin does nothing that causes Merkel or Hollande to say Putin is violating what had been understood between the negotiants, then Putin will be essentially in control on those crucial remaining details too, and the U.S. position (which favors more war) (and this is so not only from Obama but also from the Congress) will go down in flames. The next few days and weeks will thus be crucial, and Merkel and Hollande hold the top cards, because Obama needs to avoid an open break with them — something that would be an open break with the EU itself, which America's aristocracy very much don't want to happen (since America's aristocracy would then lose their enormous influence over the EU).

Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

Imagine yourself as Petro Poroshenko for a minute: you fly in for a meeting, and you discover everyone is against you, the Europeans, the Russians, even the clever Belorussian with his little smile. The ally and patron is somewhere far away, behind an ocean. You have to run to make a phone call and get instructions. People are openly chuckling when you tell them there is no encirclement at Debaltsevo. They even ask you to leave the room so that Putin, Merkel, and Hollande can speak. You can't believe in the outcome of the negotiations, and even tell the media that "all is lost." A disaster.

But you still remember that your victory can easily be transformed into treachery, and you yourself can be deprived of power and even life. You have to save face, since you are not independent and don't have any genuine power. Your competitor in Dnepropetrovsk already opened a parallel General Staff, and the efforts to disperse the Aidar failed completely. You even destroyed the coalition when you tried to make your friend/godfather the Prosecutor General.

So it's better not to return at all without an agreement. It's even more important not to return without an advantageous agreement. But there isn't one. Because they put in front of you a compromise, and you had to sign on.

Holland and Merkel are beaming, because the plan worked and they believe in its implementation.

But only Lukashenko and Putin, and the DPR/LPR representatives understand what's really going on.

The European Commission (EC) will resume energy talks with Russia and Ukraine in hope of avoiding gas problems during the winter of 2015, EC President Jean-Claude Juncker told journalists.

His announcement comes a day after the Minsk agreement, backed by the Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine created a roadmap for peace in Ukraine.


"We will renew three-party energy talks in order not to run into the same problems during the 2015 winter as we encountered before," Juncker said at the end of the EU summit on Thursday.

In October Russia, Ukraine and the EC agreed on gas supply to Ukraine until March 2015. Under the deal, Ukraine pre-paid for Russian gas at $378 per 1,000 cubic meters.

The agreement ensured Ukraine and Europe would avoid a winter energy crisis, as was the case in 2006 and 2009, when gas disputes between Ukraine and Russia resulted in gas shortages across Europe.

Russia's s gas delivery on credit to Ukraine ceased in mid-June, and the taps were only turned back on in mid-December. Deliveries resumed after Ukraine began paying off some of the $5 billion owed to Gazprom.

Ukraine's gas import monopoly, Naftogaz, has paid off $3.1 billion in in two large tranches in November and December respectively.

Theresa May's Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill received royal assent on Thursday, meaning tough new measures to prevent suspected terrorists from traveling to Iraq or Syria will come into force within the next 24 hours.

The act of royal assent, where Queen Elizabeth II signs an act of law, is the final stage needed to pass any bill, and means the measures, which were announced by the Home Secretary in November last year, can come into force almost immediately.

They include bolstering existing powers for passport removal, and will allow police to "disrupt" individuals who are suspected of leaving the country to join terror cells abroad and prevent them leaving the country while investigations are carried out.

Some counter-terrorism and security laws will also impose a duty upon pubic bodies including police, schools and universities to address individuals they believe are at risk of radicalization. They are set to commence in the coming months, subject to Parliamentary approval of crucial secondary legislation before the end of March.

Last week MPs and peers told the Home Secretary that universities should be exempt from these new measures, as they would seriously impede academic freedom of speech.

Google had a federal magistrate's approval to inform WikiLeaks employees that their emails had been the subjects of sealed search warrants, but waited six months.

A judge agreed last May to unseal orders issued in 2012, giving the US govt access to the personal accounts of three WikiLeaks journalists, for the limited purpose of informing them that their Gmail and and other intimate data had been compromised, investigative journalist Alexa O'Brien reported this week.

But while Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson authorized Google to make that disclosure on May 15, 2014, according to public records seen by O'Brien, Wikileaks acknowledged recently it was not made aware of the warrants until this past December.

Copies of the search warrants published by WikiLeaks reveal that in March 2012 the US govt served Google with an order requiring the company to hand over details of accounts opened by Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, and two editors — Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell — along with gag orders intended to indefinitely prevent their presence from being revealed. Harrison alluded to the warrants during an address at a hacker conference in Germany shortly after Christmas 2014 and further details were revealed during a press conference in Switzerland late last month.

Ukraine's Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh said his radical movement rejects the Minsk peace deal and that their paramilitary units in eastern Ukraine will continue "active fighting" according to their "own plans."

The notorious ultranationalist leader published a statement on his Facebook page Friday, saying that his radical Right Sector movement doesn't recognize the peace deal, signed by the so-called 'contact group' on Thursday and agreed upon by Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia after epic 16-hour talks.

Yarosh claimed that any agreement with the eastern militia, whom he calls "terrorists," has no legal force.

Germany holds the key to where Europe goes next. A fragile deal may have been reached on Ukraine, but there's still no deal with Greece. In both cases, there's much more than meets the eye.

Let's start with the grueling Eurogroup negotiation in Brussels over the Greek debt.

Greek officials swear they never received a draft of a possible agreement leaked by Eurogroup bureaucrats to the Financial Times. This draft, crucially, referred to an agreement "amending and extending and successfully concluding," the current austerity-heavy bailout.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble cut off "amending". This is the draft that was leaked. But then Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called Prime Minister Tsipras - and the statement, still not signed, was rejected. So this was a top Tsipras decision.

Tsipras could not possibly balk - not after previously raising the stakes - as in promising to boost the Greek minimum wage and halt privatizations. He's still betting the house that the Troika won't allow a 'Grexit'. Yet he may be wrong; the possibility of 'Grexit' is hovering around 35 percent to 40 percent, and it will be much higher if no deal is reached on the next crunch meeting, Monday.

Tsipras and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem at least agreed that Greek officials and the Troika (EC, ECB, IMF) should start talking "at a technical level." Translation: they will be comparing the current austerity nightmare with new Greek proposals.

Athens essentially has only two choices. Either the Troika accedes to some form of debt repudiation - real or as a sleight of hand (that's Syriza's proposal - an arrangement that fosters growth); or 'Grexit' ensues, with Athens creating its own central bank and currency as an independent nation. There's no third choice; a debt of 175 percent of Greece's GDP is totally unpayable.

By the late 1950s, America's rulers knew domestic Jim Crow was a global strategic liability. All but diehard Southern white supremacists could see it was bad for business, that it interfered with America's penetration of the former European colonial empires in Africa and Asia. The image of a settler state, built with stolen labor on stolen land, where lynch mobs and white violence could break out at any time, where blacks were legally under-educated couldn't compete with the egalitarian rhetoric of the Soviet Union and China. It was bad for business.

Media and political elites singled out Dr. Martin Luther King as the favored face of what they called the civil rights movement before his 30th birthday. They awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 36, but shunned and denounced him in the final year of his life when he condemned not just racism, but economic injustice at home and imperial war abroad. King's death at only 39 enabled the US elite to construct their own useful tool, the Dreamer, who is the Martin Luther King we mostly hear about today.

In the early 70s, serious enforcement of the Voting Rights Act began, while the US military, elite universities and corporations instituted what came to be known as "affirmative action." The economic gains that ordinary black families made in the the 60s and 70s didn't last. These were largely curtailed and rolled back beginning in the 80s and 90s. But by the turn of the century there were dozens of black admirals and generals, more than ten thousand blacks holding elected office, with many more un-elected officials from the US Secretary of State down to wardens of state and federal prisons, and a layer of black corporate functionaries, academics, celebrities and lawyers.

Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell were part of that layer, as are Susan Rice, Eric Holder, the despicable "Morehouse Man" Jeh Johnson at Homeland Security, and Loretta Lynch, whom President Obama has nominated to replace the first black attorney general, Eric Holder.

The government has reversed its decision to accept new fracking restrictions, meaning shale gas firms will be able to drill horizontally under National Parks, provided the wells start outside their borders.

MPs were forced by backbenchers to accept new fracking regulations in January, which included avoiding fracking in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and National Parks, but final amendments to the regulations unpicked some of the finer details.

Having welcomed the new regulations at the time, Green MP Caroline Lucas said ministers were "doing the dirty work of the fracking companies for them."

Other regulations passed by MPs included a ban of fracking in sites of scientific interest and groundwater source protection zones, which analysts said could rule out 40 percent of the UK land offered by the government for shale gas exploration.

But following amendments, Energy and Climate Change Minister Amber Rudd told MPs it would be impractical to guarantee a fracking ban in some rural areas. "In the case of AONBs and national parks, given their size and dispersion, it might not be practical to guarantee that fracking will not take place under them in all cases without unduly constraining the industry."

She added that putting strict measures in place would hinder shale gas goals. "We must not rush this now, because we would risk putting in place restrictions in areas in a way that does not achieve the intended aim, or that goes beyond it and needlessly damages the potential development of the shale industry."

Nearly a year after the massacre on Kiev's Maidan left over 50 dead, the BBC has aired footage of an opposition fighter who says he fired at police in the early morning that day, bringing into question the popular narrative that riot police fired first.

"I was shooting downward at their feet," says a man the broadcaster decided to identify as Sergei. "Of course, I could have hit them in the arm or anywhere. But I didn't shoot to kill."

According to Sergei, he took up a position in the Kiev Conservatory, a music academy located on the southwest corner of Kiev's Independence Square, on February 20.

One day prior, he had met up with a man who offered him two guns. The first was a 12-gauge shotgun, while the other was a hunting rifle - a Saiga that fired high-velocity rounds.

He chose the Saiga and hid it at a post office that, along with the conservatory, was under the protesters' control. Sergei told the BBC he was later escorted to the Conservatory, where, with a second gunman, he spent 20 minutes before 7:00 am firing on police.


Other witness testimony has corroborated his account.