Situationen i Ukraina just nu.

According to dire warnings from U.S. military and intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his daring annexation of Ukraine’s strategic Crimean Peninsula, has concentrated tens of thousands of his forces on the border with Ukraine. Camouflaged and concealed to throw off U.S. spy satellites, the warnings say, the heavily armed combat troops and special operations forces are coiled and ready to spring across the border into restive regions of Eastern and Southern Ukraine such as Kharkov and Donetsk, where pro-Russian populations are eager to be annexed by Russia, just like Crimea.

Top Russian officials – including Putin himself – have denied any such troop concentrations near the Western border. One minor Ministry of Defense official, who didn’t want to be named because he wasn’t authorized to comment, told NBC News that there had been training exercises – war games – in the border region but, once ended, those troops and armor returned to their bases. “All of this international hype is completely unfounded,” he told us earlier in the week.

Still, the stream of YouTube video clips and photos seemed to tell a different story: long convoys of Russian armored personnel carriers on a highway headed toward Ukraine; tanks and artillery pieces moving by rail on dozens of train cars; squads of MI-24 combat helicopters perched on a hill near Belgorod, only 20 miles from Ukraine. Are these preparations for a Chechnya-like invasion, or just more maneuvers meant to intimidate Ukrainians and the West?

We went to look for ourselves. Cameraman Dmitry Solovyov, sound engineer Alexei Gordienko and I packed our bags, devices and news-gathering gadgets into the back of our grey, nondescript bureau minivan and began a journey along the 1,200 mile border between Russia and Ukraine – many segments of which give no indication that it’s an actual border between two countries.

Sudzha, a small town in the region of Kursk, site of the biggest tank battle of World War II, was our first destination. A tank column had been spotted there, 5 miles from the border, about a week before. But as we drove around the quaint town – equally proud of its freshly painted Orthodox Church and its bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin – we saw no tanks, or even armored personnel carriers. We did see ATM machines on almost every block. All was quiet. There was no tension in the air. Outside town, farmers were planting winter wheat.

We traveled some 500 miles along the border – sometimes right next to Ukraine, at other times 30 to 40 miles from it – before we came across any sign of military activity. As we passed Belgorod’s army base, near the airport, I recognized the same MI-24 choppers I’d seen on the Internet. We got lucky – a pair took off as we drove past. We turned back to see them banking within the base’s perimeter. Nearby, clusters of military vehicles, mostly heavy trucks, were out in the open, but where were the tanks and artillery?

In Belgorod – the Russian city adjacent to the restive Ukrainian city of Karkov – we were briefly detained by 2 officers of the Russian FSB security service after driving right up to the border gate and asking people about the rumors of impending war. (The taxi drivers said they were angry because the Ukrainian border guards weren’t letting any Russians into the country – fearing provocations – which had dried up their business.)

We had apparently wandered into a prohibited, 3-mile wide security zone. But the agents of the former KGB were polite, even willing to talk on background.

“Look over there, ‘’said the regional chief, pointing toward the border crossing. “The Ukrainians have tanks just inside. Can you imagine if a trained, Right Sector (Ukrainian ultra-nationalist militant) commandeers the vehicle and fires on us?”

Did he think that Kiev would give that order, I asked?

“No, I don’t. But we have no faith that Kiev can prevent such an incident,” he replied. After some two hours of discussion, we were let go, each with a photocopy of the law we’d broken. ‘’You’re not the first ones,’’ said the chief, seeing us off.

After the Belgorod confrontation, we spent the next two days traversing seemingly endless farmland on pot-holed roads, passing chicken coups and old ladies selling buckets of apples -- but no signs of brewing war.

We found more army bases -- in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and Rostov, both near Ukraine’s southeastern border -- but the only activity we saw was some serious latrine duty and a band of conscripts enjoying a friendly wrestling match.

Russia increased pressure on Ukraine on Wednesday to disarm paramilitary groups, urging it to go beyond "sham" promises to crack down on the far-right and protect Russian speakers.---

Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday ordered security forces to disarm illegal armed groups and police shut down the Kiev base of a far-right nationalist group, Right Sector, after a shooting incident in which three people were wounded.

"The fact that gunmen from the Right Sector have, so to say, vacated their headquarters in central Kiev has received a lot of comment in Kiev over the recent days," a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said.

It urged the Ukrainian authorities "not to confine themselves to 'sham' statements to fight radical forces in Ukraine but to take resolute measures to disarm gunmen".

The Right Sector intends to continue arming itself unless the situation on the Ukrainian borders and in Kyiv changes, said Ihor Mazur, Right Sector's Kyiv regional leader, according to the 112 Ukraine television channel.

"If the war continues to come to Ukraine, Right Sector will be in the first trenches, it will be defending the Ukrainian state. And a sufficient number of enemies know that," he said on Tuesday.

The weapons available to Right Sector members were either personal and registered, or rented from their friends, Mazur said.

"We did what was expected of us. First of all, I repeat once again, no one issued weapons to us to reclaim them back from us. And the weapons in our hands, most of them were registered, and those that were not were rented from our friends. We have friends who are hunters and have several firearms. We gave them their weapons back. No one was injured with them, no one was killed with them.

In the midst of the continuing hostile showdown between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine, in any event, American investigators will be more interested in Firtashs’s knowledge of Gazprom’s doings than the Indian case. The penalty he is facing if convicted is a severe one – forfeiture of his holdings in 159 different companies, and 41 bank accounts, all over the world.

Firtash, according to reports, is worth as much as $1.2 billion.

Gazprom is one of the main revenue producers for the Russian budget, and much of its income is from gas shipped to and through Ukraine onward to Europe. Gas sales have been at the heart of Ukraine’s difficult relations with Russia, and have helped define the course of Ukrainian politics.

Firtash was close to ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and as a middleman on gas sales he reaped a fortune. Ukrainian analysts contend that Gazprom used its revenue to secure a hold on Ukrainian politicians, and that a great deal of its foreign income goes into hidden accounts that are available for Russian political leaders.

“Criminal conspiracies that extend beyond our borders are not beyond our reach,” said Zachary Fardon, the U.S. attorney for northern Illinois, in a Justice Department statement, referring to the allegations about the Indian bribe. “We will use all of the tools and resources available to us to ensure the integrity of global business transactions that involve U.S. commerce.”

If the West isn't going to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression, then Ukraine should defend itself by rebuilding its nuclear arsenal.

That's what Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev told a full house at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in D.C. on Wednesday. Ukraine denuclearized in 1994, when Russia, Great Britain, and the U.S. signed the Budapest Memorandum promising to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exhange for the country's accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Russia violated the agreement by invading Crimea, Dzhemilev says, so why shouldn’t Ukraine get nukes again?

Dzhemilev, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and former chair of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, the official governing body of the Tatars, was born just months before Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population to Siberia. The memory of that deportation, which killed over half of the Crimean Tatar population, is first among many reasons why the Tatars are growing increasingly anxious under Russian rule.

(Reuters) - In a diplomatic blow to Russia, the United Nations will continue to view Crimea as part of Ukraine in line with a General Assembly resolution adopted last week, the United States and Western diplomats said on Wednesday.

A smartphone app to help identify - and boycott - goods made in Russia is becoming popular among Android users in Ukraine, it appears.

The app, called Boycott the Occupiers, says it can find out where a product is made - whether in Ukraine, Russia or elsewhere - by scanning the product barcode with the phone's camera. It has already been installed between 10,000-50,000 times.