Activists from the radical feminist group Femen have staged a topless demonstration against Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in Paris. Three “sextremists” – as Femen calls its members – took off their tops at the Trocadero Square near the Eiffel Tower in the French capital. The women exposed the slogan “Ukraine is not Free”, “Putin’s new Puppet” and “Yanukovich = Tymoshenko” emblazoned across their naked chests. The three activist sported Tymoshenko’s trademark blond hair braids tied to form a slipknot. In a November interview with IBTimes UK, Femen leader and Ukrainian native Inna >>>

Ukrainian feminist nudity group Femen protesting at Davos on Saturday. Three of its activists were detained. DAVOS, Switzerland — Ukraine’s president showed no mercy Friday for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, despite increasing fears that her case will hurt his country’s struggling economy and its relations with the European Union. The gas contract with Russia that was the premise for Tymoshenko’s conviction “is Ukraine’s biggest problem today,” President Viktor Yanukovych said at the World Economic >>>

Just what were last year’s protests in Kyiv square all about? By now we have all heard the official version of events. Concerned lest the government of Viktor Yanukovych tilt Ukraine toward the Kremlin, demonstrators occupied Maidan square and pushed for a so-called association agreement with the European Union. Once security forces resorted to repression, however, the crowd became radicalized with some activists calling for an end to the overall culture of corruption and others advocating a more thorough anti-authoritarian agenda. As violence >>>

The writer and translator Keith Gessen wrote last year of how western coverage of his country of birth, Russia, was refracted through the distorted prism of the west’s own obsessions in the 2000s and 2010s.  While self-identifying ‘left-wing’ writers in the west like Seumas Milne fall into the same trap as Living Marxism magazine and Harold Pinter did over Milosevic in the 1990s –an intellectually infantile apologising for an authoritarian leader just because the leader in question is “a counter-weight to the west” – Gessen pinpointed a more subtle cultural trend >>>