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in Europe are refusing to cooperate with judicial executors. Five subsidiaries state that the Russian company no longer owns them, according to Interfax-Ukraine.
Ukraine is going to create an EU lobbying group tasked with stopping the construction of the second section of the Russian Nord Steam II gas pipeline , according to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. "Nord Stream II is an absolutely political project against Ukraine, which has no economic component, trying to take away from Ukraine a budget of almost $3bn," Poroshenko wrote in his report in the Medium online platform for social journalism, Interfax news agency reported on June 15. "I am convinced that with joint, united efforts we will be able to stop it," the president added. "That is why we are now creating a group in the European Union, which should stop the Nord Stream II. That is why we are actively negotiating with Germany. We invite them to create an international consortium for the management of the gas transportation system of Ukraine,” Poroshenko wrote. With green lights from Swedish Finland and Germany, Denmark is the last obstacle for the Nord Stream II pipeline that is being built by Russia's natural gas giant Gazprom and the last country on the pipeline's route not to have issued a construction permit. Poland continues to actively lobby against the pipeline in EU, initiating anti-trust proceedings against Gazprom and pushing for tougher opposition to the pipeline in the European Commission. More recently the pipeline has been threatened in Switzerland, where bailiffs reportedly visited the office of the Nord Stream company in the canton of Zug in Switzerland as part of execution of the $2.6bn decision of Stockholm arbitration in favour of Ukraine.
An independent anti-corruption court (ACC) in Ukraine will be set up by the end of 2018 , the nation's President Petro Poroshenko said during a lecture for students of Law Faculty of Taras Shevchenko National University on June 8. A law to establish the court was voted through parliament on June 7. The establishing of the anti-corruption court is a crucial condition for a new tranche from a $17.5bn support package agreed by Kyiv with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2015. Ukraine has received $8.4bn from the IMF so far under the lender's programme.
Over 1.5mn IDPs registered in Ukraine. "As of 11 June 2018, 1.509,938 internally displaced persons, or 1.234,904 families from Donbas and Crimea, were registered according to the data from social protection departments at the regional and Kyiv city state administrations, ," the Social Policy Ministry reports.
Russia will never return occupied Crimea to Ukraine , Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview on the Austrian TV channel ORF, English-language transcript of which was published by the Kremlin on June 6. "There are no such conditions and there can never be," Putin said, answering the question what should happen in order for Russia to return Crimea, illegally occupied by Moscow in 2014, to Ukraine. According to Putin, Russia's military occupation of the peninsula was triggered by "the unconstitutional armed coup took place in Ukraine, and power changed hands by force". "Our army was legally deployed in Crimea – under the agreement on our military base there. The first thing we did was increase our contingent to guard our armed forces,
12 UKRAINE Country Report July 2018 www.intellinews.com