The WBO sent a letter via email to Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn, who promotes Joshua and co-promotes Usyk, as well as to Joshua, Usyk and Usyk co-promoter Alexander Krassyuk of K2 Promotions, formally ordering the bout.

"The WBO World Championship Committee hereby orders the parties herein commencement of negotiations for the above-mentioned WBO heavyweight mandatory championship contest," the WBO wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN. "Please be advised that the parties have 30 days upon receipt of this letter to reach an agreement. If an accord is not reached within the time frame set forth herein, a purse bid will be ordered pursuant with the WBO regulations of world championship contests." (ESPN)

"266. ...The Office also assessed that direct military engagement between the respective armed forces of the Russian Federation and Ukraine, indicated the existence of an international armed conflict in eastern Ukraine from 14 July 2014 at the latest, in parallel to the non-international armed conflict." (p. 69 of the Report)

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"Neptun cruise anti-ship missile is capable of striking warships with up to 5000 tons of water displacement at a distance of up to 280 km (the export version).

The system consists of four anti-ship missiles, their launchers and a land mobile platform. The weight of each missile is 670 kg, and its fragmentation-explosive warheads weights 145 kg.

The Neptun is a subsonic coastal missile system with cruise missiles designed to engage enemy surface fighting ships and auxiliaries vessels both single and belonging to Task Forces." (Defence-Blog)

"The warheads atop the SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs in Ukraine had explosive yields of 400-550 kilotons each — that is, 27 to 37 times the size of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima." (Brookings) 

"...near Fairfield, Connecticut, on a bleak and wind-tortured reef in Long Island Sound, something wonderful happened.

Two men stranded on an oil barge and in peril of being washed overboard were lifted to safety by a hoist on a Sikorsky helicopter. On that day, Thursday, November 29, 1945, the helicopter entered a new and promising age." (Sikorsky Archive)

Did you know Igor Sikorsky assembled his first helicopters in his native Kiev? Did you know he wrote a letter where he said that his whole family was purely Ukrainian by descent? The book "Ukraine & the United States" has the details.

"...Anatevka, as it’s named to invoke the Jewish shtetl in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” has at least a walk-on role in the Donald Trump impeachment drama. 

Anatevka’s honorary mayor is Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s Ukraine point man, and its fundraisers include Giuliani’s two associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who’ve been indicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. political campaigns." (Full Story)

Rafał Lemkin was a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide and initiating the Genocide Convention. Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 or 1944 from genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing) (Wikipedia)

"What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. This is, as I have said, only the logical successor of such Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000 Crimean Tatars by order of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of Ivan the Terrible's ‘SS troops’ — the Oprichnina; the extermination of National Polish leaders and Ukrainian Catholics by Nicholas I; and the series of Jewish pogroms that have stained Russian history periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Each is a case in the longterm policy of liquidation of non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts." (Full Speech)

“From 1932 to 1933, the totalitarian Soviet regime launched a campaign of starvation across Ukraine. Millions died, and countless others were arrested, deported, or executed in a genocide designed to break their will.

“In the face of these horrors, the people of Ukraine endured, protecting their language, their culture, and their identity. In 1991, after decades of Soviet rule and oppression, they gained their independence." (pm.gc.ca)

Like Clough and Revie, Menotti and Bilardo, these two former managers of the Soviet Union could hardly have been more opposed in their methods. 

Thermal engineering graduate Lobanovsky, who had three separate spells as USSR boss, was akin to a scientist in his analytical planning and hands-on coordination. Beskov saw football as art and was more than happy to give his players the creative freedom to express themselves on the pitch. The conflict was at its fiercest in the late-'70s and throughout the ’80s, when Lobanovsky was in charge of Dynamo Kiev and Beskov was at Spartak Moscow.

Lobanovsky had the upper hand in terms of trophies – Dynamo won the Soviet Supreme League four times between 1980 and 1986, bookended by Spartak getting their hands on the championship in 1979 and 1987 – but Beskov won plenty of plaudits and admirers for his team’s entertaining style of play. (fourfourtwo.com)

Lobanovsky also "guided Dynamo Kiev football club to eight Soviet league championships, six Soviet Cups, five straight Ukrainian league titles (1997–2001), two European Cup–Winners’ Cups (1975 and 1986), the 1975 Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA) Super Cup title, and the semifinal of the UEFA Champions League in 1999." (Britannika)

Three players of Lobanovsky's teams - Oleh Blokhin, Ihor Belanov and Andriy Shevchenko received the Golden Ball as the best players of European football. 

In the whole Soviet football history, there was only a goalkeeper Lev Yashin who received a similar award in 1963 besides those three Ukrainian forwards.

20. Barcelona 0-4 Dynamo Kiev

Group stage, 1997/98

In 1986, a nine-year-old child had to be evacuated from his home in Kiev’s suburbs after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor 80 miles north exploded, spewing a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere.

Eleven years later, Andriy Shevchenko was scoring a hat-trick against a Barça side that featured Rivaldo and Luis Figo. “In Kiev, we had beaten Barcelona 3-0 and a friend said, ‘Let’s see how you do in the return’,” Sheva later laughed. “He bet me that I wouldn’t score three goals. He ended up buying dinner.”

Kiev reached the semi-finals the following season before Shevchenko moved on to Milan. (fourfourtwo.com)

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