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Three signals from Kyiv and beyond, October 2021
Summary
A look back at a Supreme Court appointment in Ukraine and two moves in Russia's relations with the West.
What did the days around 23 October 2021 reveal about the region? Three reports, taken together, offer a snapshot.
On 22 October 2021, Vsevolod Kniaziev was elected head of the Supreme Court of Ukraine. The election was the most direct domestic development in Ukraine in this period.
Two other reports concerned Russia and its relations with the West. On 18 October 2021, Russia announced that it would suspend its mission to NATO in Brussels as early as 1 November. The announcement came in response to the expulsion of eight diplomats, accused of espionage, from the mission earlier that month. Russia also said that the NATO information bureau and the military liaison in Moscow would be terminated.
On 19 October 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it had raided the Washington, D.C. house of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. The US Treasury Department had sanctioned him in 2018.
The reports concern different institutions and different capitals, and they are best read as separate items rather than a single story. Still, they show how, in the week before 23 October 2021, contacts between Russia and Western institutions were being reduced in one case and subjected to law-enforcement action in another, while Ukraine's top court received a new head.
