What did Ukraine's news cycle show by 24 May 2018?

What was Ukraine dealing with by 24 May 2018? Reports from the preceding days covered sport, regional diplomacy and the war in the east, and they fit together less neatly than their dates suggest.

Football under investigation

On 22 May 2018, the National Police of Ukraine announced a large-scale operation in a match-fixing case in Ukrainian football. Thirty-five clubs were under suspicion. Police documented at least 57 episodes of crime involving more than 328 people. The scale of the inquiry made it a matter for the sport as a whole rather than for a handful of clubs.

Leaving the CIS bodies

On 19 May 2018, President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree ending Ukraine's participation in the statutory bodies of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The decree described the end of participation as final, a formal step in how Kyiv dealt with the organisation.

The front line

The same day, Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation reported that Russian-led militants had carried out 43 attacks on Ukrainian troops in Donbas over 24 hours. Artillery systems were used, and 120mm and 82mm mortars were fired ten times. No Ukrainian servicemen were reported killed or wounded. According to intelligence data, two militants were killed and three wounded. Daily figures of this kind show a conflict that continued with regular shelling.

A record in Rome

On 20 May 2018, Elina Svitolina won the WTA Premier tournament in Rome, beating world number one Simona Halep. The win set a national record for the number of tournaments won, and it offered a different kind of news from the same week.

Reading the week

Taken together, the reports show a country pursuing a formal break with a post-Soviet organisation while the fighting in Donbas went on, with domestic institutions investigating corruption in sport and an athlete's success also in the news.