U.S. President Donald Trump has been tweeting about Crimea and our news desk has this report:
Trump Blasts Media Over 'Russian Connection,' Suggests Obama Was Soft On Moscow
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter on February 15 that "Crimea was taken by Russia" during the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and added: "Was Obama too soft on Russia?"
In a series of tweets two days after he called for and accepted the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn amid questions over Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington in December, Trump also lashed out at the media.
"The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred," Trump said on Twitter. "This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton's losing campaign."
The tweets followed a February 14 report in The New York Times that cited current and former U.S. officials as saying members of Trump's campaign and other associates had contacts with Russian intelligence officials in the months before the November 2016 presidential election.
Russia seized control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, after sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegal by the United States and a total of 100 countries in the UN General Assembly.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on February 14 that Trump has "made it very clear" that he expects Russia to "return Crimea" and reduce violence in eastern Ukraine, where a war between government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 9,750 people since April 2014.
Russian Foreign Ministry to take on "fake news" now, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says:
"In the nearest time, we will launch our own project on the [Russian] Foreign Ministry's website where we will collect fake news from leading international media outlets -- but not only from them -- and also statements by officials and representatives of various countries. We will largely unmask them, publish their primary sources and [source] data, and show that Russian reactions at the respective issues have already been published."
Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives gets on the Russia sanctions bandwagon:
Senator John McCain responds to President Donald Trump's tweet calling his predecessor "soft" on Russia:
For background on Iryna Dovhan: Ukrainian Woman Tells Of Public Abuse At Hands Of Pro-Moscow Separatists