MainNews -

Scoop of the day: New ministers, Russian fake news

Scoop of the day: New ministers, Russian fake news

Government reshuffle

Parliament has dismissed Vadym Prystayko as deputy prime minister for European integration and appointed Olha Stefanishyna to the post. MPs also appointed former media manager and propresidential MP Oleksandr Tkachenko as culture minister.

Coronavirus

Ukraine has registered the biggest single-day increase in coronavirus cases, which reached 588, according to the Coronavirus Spread Monitoring System. There have been a total of 25,411 cases, including 747 deaths and 11,040 recoveries.

Zelenskyy

On a visit to Khmelnytskyy, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he plans to task the Foreign Ministry with considering lifting visas for residents of a number of foreign states in order to boost Ukraine's profile as a tourist destination.

Poroshenko

The National Council for TV and Radio Broadcasting has ordered another unscheduled inspection of the private news-based Pryamyy TV channel supportive of ex-President Petro Poroshenko. The council is unhappy with the channel using inappropriate vocabulary such as "ass" and "shit" during prime time. This will be the third check of the channel over six months.

Ex-President Petro Poroshenko met a number of ambassadors of the Baltic and Scandinavian countries to share his concerns over what he described as Ukraine's rollback "to the times of politically-motivated persecutions and the slowing down of reforms".

Poroshenko's lawyer Ihor Holovan has said that a court's decision that his client may be brought in for questioning by force is "yet another violation of law" and "yet another proof of the purely political nature of all the cases" against the ex-president.

Russia fakes

The riots in Brazil and the spread of provocative information, in particular regarding the Ukrainian flags at a rally in support of President Jair Bolsonaro, give reason to say that Russia is conducting an operation to discredit Ukraine, ambassador Rostyslav Tronenko has told Ukrinform. "Time passes but the patterns of Soviet-Russian propaganda about 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism' remain the same," he noted.

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) chief Ivan Bakanov has said that reports about "secret prisons of the SBU" are fake news and "fantasies of Russian propagandists".

Crime

Police have searched the premises of the Law Faculty at the National Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv in the framework of a corruption case. However, the Education Ministry said that police were checking "the organization of the education process" at the faculty.

The appeal chamber of the High Anticorruption Court has cancelled custody for former Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Rayisa Bohatyryova because "the Kyiv prosecutor's office grossly violated the Code of Criminal Procedures of Ukraine by improperly declaring her a suspect" in gross embezzlement during the state procurement of medicines.

A Kyiv prosecutor was detained accepting $100,000 in a bribe in exchange for providing a "cover-up" for a bank.

Military

Parliament has passed the bill on a new system of senior officers' ranks in the Armed Forces. It replaces major-general with brigade general, lieutenant-general with major-general, colonel-general with lieutenant-general, and army general with general.

"Family values"

The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations has initiated a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss "the need to form state family policy, counteraction to family violence and commercial surrogacy".

Read LB.ua news on social networks Facebook, Twitter and Telegram