The Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has decided to employ a plan to cancel the elections and advance his positions in Donbas. The spokesperson of the Armed Forces of the People’s Republic of Donetsk reports that they posses intelligence data confirming Ukraine planning to targeting an OSCE patrol with an explosive device, placed on the road. This way, Poroshenko would have a pretext to cancel the elections. OSCE would withdraw its personnel from Donbas and leave the field open for Ukraine’s army.
The crisis in Venezuela is caused by US sanctions and asset seizures, which together amount to an economic war on the Latin American country.
Recurring pro-Kremlin narrative on Venezuela. The current and most acute stage of the Venezuelan economic crisis was caused largely by the 2014 oil price crash. However, the national economy had suffered from mismanagement and over-reliance on crude exports since at least mid-2000s; shortages of consumer goods -- which had become a chronic issue by 2010 -- have been linked to government and military corruption, overspending, and price controls. By the time the first round of US sanctions was imposed in 2017, the Maduro administration had already started deploying the term "economic war" to explain away its own policy failures and to trivialise the scale of the crisis. A 2015 government pamphlet dismissed inflation as a "fascist" concept that "does not exist in real life" (pp. 5, 8), and gave assurances that money-printing was a sound fiscal practice (p. 7).