US is to send Ukraine more non-lethal military aid, including drones and armored Humvees, AP reported, citing a phone call between Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

Biden told Poroshenko of the decision during a phone call, according to US officials, AP reported.

The aid package includes the small Raven drone system, which can be launched by hand, radios, counter mortar radars, 30 heavily armored Humvees and 200 regular ones.

The drones and the other equipment being sent is worth around $75 million. It was not immediately clear how much the Humvees cost.

Washington and other NATO allies have spent in excess of $100 million in security aid to Ukraine, although until now this has been primarily of a non-lethal nature.

"We have over the last 14 months provided $118 million in security assistance" to the Ukrainian authorities, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs earlier this month.

The US also announced earlier in March that they were planning to send about 300 military advisors to train the Ukrainian army from March through October.

The UK also announced that it will send 75 British military personnel in March who will offer medical, intelligence and infantry training to the Ukrainian army. Poland has also said it is sending military advisors to Ukraine.

A military analyst has told Fox News that the only way to turn the tide in conflict in Eastern Ukraine is to "start killing Russians." The former general alleged there are 12,000 Russian regular troops currently "camped" on Ukrainian territory.

On Tuesday, Fox News Channel aired a segment featuring Robert H. Scales, a former United States Army major general, who shared his own plan to settle the Ukrainian crisis. The recipe is simple: kill the alleged Russian soldiers roaming eastern Ukraine.

Scales acknowledged that an ongoing deployment of American troops to Eastern Europe is unlikely to change the situation and did not elaborate on who is supposed to eliminate the fabled Russian servicemen: Ukrainian troops or American GIs.

The interview ran as follows:

Fox News: 3,000 US troops deploying to Eastern Europe, some armor will be going with them, apparently. To what effect and what do you expect?

Robert H. Scales: I think to no effect. It's game, set and match in Ukraine. The only way the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is start killing Russians. Killing Russians by... Killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to their motherland in body bags. But given the amount of support we've given to the Ukrainians and given the ability of Ukrainians themselves to counterattack against 12,000 Russians camped in their country - sadly, that's not likely to happen.

Russia decided to suspend its work in the Joint Consultative Group on the CFE Treaty because it could not use this format to discuss issues relating to conventional weapons control in Europe, Mikhail Ulyanov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department on non-proliferation and arms control issues, said.

"When Wikileaks published secret documents, Department of State materials, what we had seen was confirmed: the U.S. had prohibited their allies from discussing any substantive issues in the Joint Consultative Group. In that situation, there was not much point in our further participation in the work of the Joint Consultative Group, it was becoming increasingly evident, and we have now decided to suspend our participation in the work of this group," he said in an interview with Interfax.

Ulyanov said Russia decided to make an exception for the Joint Consultative Group as a dialogue site when it made a decision to suspend its participation in the CFE Treaty in 2007.

"Indeed, we hoped then that work to resume an appropriate new conventional arms control on the continent would begin," he said.

"Unfortunately, it could not be done. The consultations on this issue were taken out of the Joint Consultative Group format. They were conducted in a Russia-U.S. format, although the Treaty was always called the 'cornerstone' of European security. The western Europeans in NATO essentially disassociated themselves and left it to Russia and the U.S. to decide," the diplomat said.

The government had urged Hatoyama not to visit the region, which was annexed by Russia about a year ago. Officials feared that if a former prime minister entered the territory with a Russian visa, it could conflict with Japan's stance that Russia unilaterally took the territory from Ukraine in violation of international law.

But Hatoyama, who served as prime minister for just nine months from 2009 to 2010, paid no heed to Tokyo's concerns, kicking off his three-day Crimea trip with a visit to the seaside city of Yalta, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.

"I possibly could in some way promote the development of cultural and humanitarian ties between Crimea and Japan," the agency quoted Hatoyama as saying.

The former prime minister was set to give a speech to university students in Crimea on Thursday, RIA Novosti reported.

The Ukrainian province was annexed by Moscow on March 18 last year, triggering international condemnation.

Japanese officials fear Moscow could exploit his visit in its efforts to justify the annexation.

Earlier on Tuesday in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said the government would "continue to urge former Prime Minister Hatoyama" not to visit Crimea.

Russia decided to suspend its participation in meetings of the joint consultative group on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe

NATO is disappointed with Russia's decision to suspend participation in the Joint Consultative Group on the Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Russia's Foreign Ministry said that Russia decided to suspend its participation in the Joint Consultative Group on CFE from March 11, 2015. Belarus will represent Russia's interests in this format. Thus, Russia's 2007 suspension of observance of its treaty obligations has become complete.

"This step [made] by the Russian side does not mean its rejection of further dialogue on control over conventional armed forces in Europe, if and when our partners are ready for it. We are still ready for joint work on the new regime of control over conventional armed forces in Europe, which will meet the interests of both Russia and other European countries," Anton Mazur, who headed Russia's delegation at talks in Vienna on military security and arms control, said.

Russia will explore the creation of a single currency across the Moscow-led Eurasian Union trade bloc of ex-Soviet states, according to an order published on the Kremlin's website.

The move comes as relations between union members Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan are strained by tit-for-tat sanctions between Moscow and the West over Ukraine and a Russian recession that is spilling over into neighboring economies.

According to the order, President Vladimir Putin requested Russia's government and Central Bank work with financial regulators in the bloc's member nations to present by Sept. 1 a report "defining the vector of financial and currency integration within the Eurasian Union and examining the desirability and possible creation of a currency union in the future."

The Eurasian Union was formed on Jan. 1 this year on the basis of an earlier customs union between several former Soviet republics. Russia lobbied hard to create the bloc, which unites around 170 million people and will be joined by Kyrgyzstan later this year.

But customs posts briefly reappeared between bloc members late last year as Russia tried to enforce a ban on a range of food imports from Western countries and the European Union that was adopted in retaliation for sanctions.

Meanwhile, a 50 percent fall in the value of Russia's ruble since last summer and an expected economic contraction of up to 5 percent this year have sparked currency devaluations and curtailed growth forecasts in post-Soviet nations that are heavily dependent on Russia's economy.

I voted for Barack Obama for president twice, for one reason: I thought he would not get us into a nuclear war. Now I'm afraid even that reason for my vote is wearing thin, threatened by US and NATO aggression in Ukraine. As the US continues threatening to send so-called "defensive" weapons to the Ukraine government and to impose yet more economic sanctions against Russia - despite the recent ceasefire agreement beginning to take hold - the prospect of Armageddon by accident increases. Moreover, Russian president Vladimir Putin has said he would (understandably) regard the US arming the Ukrainian military an act of war, to which Russia would respond. I don't think that means he would resort to nuclear weapons, at least initially. But if the already tense situation continues to heat up, anything could happen.

The latest is that the US is readying soldiers for Ukraine deployment. "The US Army is preparing to send approximately 300 troops at a time to train Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine, according to documents posted on a government contracting site." Oh, but they'll only be there as advisers, like in Vietnam. But then there are the "massive wargames in Eastern Europe and naval exercises in the Black Sea, [where] warships from the US, Turkey, Italy, Canada and Romania started drills" earlier this month. And then there's the NATO military parade on February 24, held just 300 meters from the Russian border. "About 140 pieces of armor and 10 times as many troops, including US soldiers, took part in that event." Naturally those suspicious Russians claim that "NATO is using the situation in Ukraine to push closer to Russia's border." And frankly, this makes me a little nervous myself.

But don't we need to take on "the new Hitler," as Hillary Clinton has called Mr. Putin, by any means necessary? Well, if Putin really were comparable to Hitler, at least we might have an excuse to be involved in Ukraine. But even then - updating our thinking from the 1930s - it should be the first rule of sensible geopolitics that nuclear powers never, ever fight. And it helps that Putin, to my mind, has committed no aggression in Ukraine.

Germany says it won't pay Greece World War 2 reparations after Greek PM Alexis Tsipras said Berlin is using legal tricks to avoid paying compensation. Germany says it's honored its obligations, while Greece says it may start seizing German property.

Germany once again dismissed Greek demands to pay reparations for the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece.

"It is our firm belief that questions of reparations and compensation have been legally and politically resolved," said Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"We should concentrate on current issues and, hopefully, what will be a good future," Reuters reported him as saying.

A spokesman for the finance ministry said there was no point in holding talks with the Greek government concerning the issue of reparations. The spokesman also added that the demands from Athens were just trying to distract attention away from the serious financial problems the country is facing.

Following the Duma, or Russian Parliament, President Vladimir Putin has signed the ratification of a law that sanctions Russian participation in the $100 billion BRICS Bank on Monday.

The BRICS bank, Putin has said, "will become one of the largest multilateral financial development institutions in the world".

"The bank and the Currency Pool, with combined resources of 200 billion dollars, lay the foundation for coordinating a macroeconomic policy between our nations," Putin said during the 6^th BRICS Summit in Brazil.

North Carolina's environmental officials have hit Duke Energy with a record $25 million fine over its role in contaminating local groundwater with pollution from a pair of coal ash pits at a disused power plant.

The Duke Energy power plant site in Sutton, North Carolina has a pair of unlined dumps estimated to hold 2.6 million tons of coal ash - the waste that's left after burning coal for electricity - which contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and over a dozen other heavy metals, many of which are toxic.

Monitoring wells near the dumps showed the pollution - which is considered a public health risk - included nine metals, among them boron, thallium, selenium, iron, manganese, and other chemicals that exceed state groundwater standards. Thallium was used for decades as the active ingredient in rat poison until it was banned due to being highly toxic.