coming up on r t four days ukraine has been caught in the grip of chaos lives have been lost while protesters and authorities quietly know a peace deal has been reached between the government and opposition leaders but will it hold the storm of violence the latest on ukraine just ahead and opposition to the u.s. drone for all round engagement is continuing to grow a new human rights watch report claims that a drone strike on a wedding party violated president obama's rules to protect civilians or on the u.s. drone program coming up. and the sochi olympic games near the end of the competition team usa took on canada i invented hockey for a chance to play for gold will have an update from sochi later in the show.

it's friday february twenty first happy friday everyone the four pm in washington d.c. i'm maggie lopez and you are watching our t. america well let's begin this afternoon in ukraine it is a country that has commanded the attention from the mainstream media networks this week with images that look like scenes from world war two or the end of time. these are the sights and sounds that have been broadcast around the world from ukraine for months protesters have occupied independence square and various government buildings to try to force president yana colbert his hand but only in the past week or so has the world actually begun to pay attention i know people can't help but look because this is a first world country with deep rooted culture that appears to be collapsing in on

itself viewers around the world care at least temporarily anyway because the images are arabs. salute lee captivating and will continue to be so until the next crisis goes along not in could be in the making as we speak a peace deal has been reached between the ukrainian government and opposition leaders that is expected to end the bloodshed it is a ray of hope after days upon days of darkness earlier i spoke with our to correspondent alexei euro chef who was live on the ground in ukraine and i first asked him to outline the terms of this new deal. well essentially this is the biggest concessions that the ruling party could have ever made to the opposition and not only because they agreed to hold the early election although the date has not yet been set. and even though the even agreed to return to the constitution of ukraine of two thousand and four which essentially gives more power to the parliament rather than the president something that's going to call which changed

in twenty ten when he was his second year in office he basically gave powers to himself now it's going back again to the parliamentarian republic here in ukraine but the probably the biggest concession and this is unimaginable to be completely honest with you i was shocked when i heard the news that the parliament ratified the lord decriminalizing the criminal the article of the criminal code of ukraine which landed. the former prime minister the lady the whole world knows pretty well in prison for seven years she's already spent two years in prison and she is definitely seen as the main ally as the main as the main enemy for unocal which politically has been so reluctant to let her go from prison and that he actually sec rafah is the trade agreement with the european union because the e.u. was demanding to let a machine could go only then they would sign the deal so this is a very big news for ukraine and in fact there's the word on the ground right now that ukraine may have released its future president from prison here what is

definitely the biggest concessions we've seen to date the last time let's talk about that a little bit more deal detail now yulia tymoshenko of course is the opposition leader she is a former prime minister can you tell us a little bit more about the decriminalization of the law and also what's the likelihood of president finally signing that deal into into actual law well that deal as far as we know has already been signed by both the opposition and the president and the opposition have in fact. managed to push through several laws inside the parliament which have good could not have happened in any other circumstances rather than this violent people in the capital of ukraine talking about unity certainly she is the biggest political rival of unocal which. instigated as many believe this case against her she got a seven year prison term for abuse of power when he said when she signed gas deals

with russia in two thousand and nine and she spent only two years in prison off a seven prison a seven year prison term now she may actually walk free and chances of winning the presidential election in two months and go walks free from prison and becomes a contender becomes the running candidate for the presidential election are very slim so essentially this is look this looks like young digging his own hole i mean . already we have information that many deputies from the ruling party have defected to the opposition this this may make things even worse for you on a call which with tymoshenko just called the join of arc of orange revolution she used to be the prime minister she nearly won the presidential election against you know in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten excuse me but definitely right now with all the anger with all the frustration of maybe it's against their power against the president to push and call me back maybe back with far more power

far more support than she used to have in twenty ten and alexei i can't help but to notice that you're outside versus yesterday when you were in the hotel kind of bunker down a little bit more what you say bad things are finally starting to calm down as a result of this new deal between the ukrainian government and the opposition leaders how are they responding to it you know we would all very like to think that this is the yeah the story may be dying down the streets of kiev may return to peaceful life again but this is not the case it's hard. we may allege because literally just minutes ago one of the leaders of the rightwing sect of the so-called right wing section which is the core of the protests the guys who are literally instigating all of fighting and all the front line have a he spoke from the stage over here at the right behind me and he said that he cared little about any laws about any concessions made by the government he made

only one straight to monitor that young a call which must resign by ten o'clock in the morning on saturday otherwise the right wing sect will attack with weapons they will try to storm governmental buildings and they will again be back to full attack mode so this as as this statement is creating some serious concerns i mean there's a sort of a panic spreading around many journalists in this hotel right now the same hotel which was fired at and we ourselves were fired at by sniper bullets at our live position journal many journalists here right now told me that they are actually considering to evacuate from here if things are starting to get really nasty and nobody can rule that out because we've been to that point before on wednesday night the opposition the president agree on the truce on a cease fire to work out of some kind of agreement on thursday morning the right wing sector shows that they care little about any kind of agreements they go into full attack mode almost two hundred people died as

a result of that attack so you can see for yourself it's still unstable it's still far from being a truce and we're still far from saying this is all over and we can go home now i understand that ukrainian lawmakers within the halls of parliament were also fighting and kind of duking it out so obviously they are fighting with among some selves and there is contention even within the parliament itself can you talk to that yes we seen some scuffles in the parliament during the day when they were discussing the laws i cannot tell you for sure what caused these scuffles but certainly tensions were running high but essentially on. the scuffles after the break which the parliament announced after that. information started flowing in that some of the deputies from the ruling party defected to the opposition maybe as a result of that's got to leave as a result of the violence and they didn't no longer want to see that violence in their country but essentially and at the end of the day they had a constitutional majority in parliament and more than three hundred votes in most

of the cases and most of the laws were given in order in favor of these laws something unprecedented for. rather turbulent political life in ukraine inside the walls of ukrainian parliament but definitely tensions were high both outside and inside the cranium parliament for the last several days so with this new deal box the beginning of the end in terms of these crazy and kind of scenes that we've seen play out with mine ammunition being used on both sides thank you so much for your reporting and please stay safe r.t. correspondent alexei euro cesky on the ground in ukraine now in the midst of all of this fighting and all this political disagreement foreign political interests are also at play in ukraine congressman dana rohrbacher slammed his colleagues this week for taking sides in the turmoil he says and no one knows for sure who started the violence in ukraine and accuse the protesters of using quote brute force representative rohrbacher as the chairman of the house foreign affairs panel on

europe and he joins me now to explain his position congressman rohrabacher thank you so much first of all for taking the time to sit down with us i first want to get your take on the protesters because it's different from many of your other colleagues in congress why are they being presented in your opinion as peaceful protesters in the mainstream media is is that how you see them. well they are they represent a large segment jimi of the ukrainian population but we have to remember ukraine is a very divided country you have about half the country really wants closer relations with russia and the other half of the code regards closer relations moreover european tilt to their country these are two diametrically opposed and people kill very strongly about it well these type of visions should be settled at the ballot box and i'm just wondering first of all what is this idea about having foreign countries have to sign off to an agreement between ukrainians themselves

that's that's kind of odd that this government that government signed off on the on the agreement this should be left up to the people and it should be settled now in the streets but in the ballot by ballot even if they didn't like where the government was doing they should kick them out of the next election i'm just wondering that no matter who wins the next election whether this president means now if you feel really strongly about it are willing to really get out in the streets and risk losing your lives you could force any position onto the ukrainian government that would be there'd be a lot of turmoil in the future and as you say we are seeing these diametrically opposing opinions playing out in the streets with this crazy violence that's going on now senators john mccain and chris murphy traveled to kiev in december senator murphy said quote ukraine's future stands with europe and the u.s. stands with ukraine while senator mccain proclaimed quote america stands with you

do you think that this kind of speech as appropriate. no i don't and i think that it's up to the ukrainian people to decide what is in their best interest and yes the russians by the way worked through it what it is is those were the there's a lot of people in the republican party who are still treating russia as if it was the soviet union the cold war is over putin decided that he would like to have and of course there's no reason why he shouldn't be representing the interests of russia he is the president of russia he offered the ukrainians a deal and if they wouldn't go towards the european direction well ok they have a right to accept or reject that their government has a right to accept or reject it without having us trying to say well if you accept any closer ties with russia that must mean you're a puppet and you're corrupt and your gangster well the united states that's really

interfering locally with what ukrainians should be deciding for themselves and i understand that president obama actually called president vladimir putin today do you think that that call even should have taken place. well i don't know what he was talking about. it would be nice of. mr putin and the united states were both dedicated to getting back to the democratic process and allowing elections to happen and allowing people who are elected to make the decisions for the country in this case i don't see a dichotomy i don't see mr putin opposing that and that should be our position as a as americans that we believe in the democratic process so i just you know mr putin is demonized by a lot of people here and there when he's overwatch you know for russia's interest we're acting as if this is the old cold war days and it was a communist overture to do something to dominate the world well putin has

a right to watch out for the interests of the people there just as the way we do in the united states and just as the ukrainian government should be doing what you know for the interests of the people of ukraine so it all boils down to business essentially what you're saying now let's talk about this peace deal you say that if ukraine wants to have peace then they should go to the ballot boxes and do it there now with this new deal they're saying they're calling for early elections for up in the first presidential elections by december does this peace deal undermine the democratically elected government since a centrally it reverses the constitution and forces are early elections i mean what kind of a message doesn't send to protestors does it say that if they go to the streets and riot that they will get what they want. well they went to the streets they don't necessarily we don't know whether they went to the streets and rioted or not there's a lot of evidence to indicate that people were being shot that the authorities once they were in the streets started brutalizing them there's that evidence

but also there's evidence that there are hot heads among the people who are demonstrating and the they all word is peaceful as is being brought frayed and victims as they are being betrayed the most important thing however is the rule of law and yes human rights have to be protected people have a right to demonstrate and express their opposition to government policy but also we have the rule of law to think about that when when a government is elected it should be the that is the group of people who were elected to make decisions are the ones who should set the policy now what we've learned in ukraine now that if it looks like it you can if you really disagree with what the elected government is doing you should go to the streets and just raise holy hell until those policies are reversed or until there's some change made in the procedure well certainly that's not going to lead that's

a good lead to peace in the ukraine in the future so certainly does lie on both sides and we don't really know right now who are us insinuated this kind of chaos that we're seeing play out in the streets and we don't have too much time left but we've seen no last few years massive demonstrations happen throughout the arab world recently in turkey in bahrain we've seen the play on the european union with austerity riots we've even seen them here in the u.s. with the occupy movement what's the appropriate response from governments to movements that happen like this and are taken out to the streets. well the important thing is that all people in these countries whether it's the united states or elsewhere that these people have a right to demonstrate they don't have a right to blockade straight sort of occupied territory but they have a right to protest and and express themselves and their opposition to government policies as are as aggressively as they can without stepping on the rights of others and. you know in the united states if you have an occupy movement the only

they wrong with that is they were occupying territory and sitting down and saying oh we control is now well as long as people are are just in parks and and having protest meetings of the things like that without actually taking possession of a given part of town people's those rights need to be protected but at the same time elected government. that that principle that the elected people see you can be a very small minority and get hundreds of thousands of people out so the food the right of the majority to elect its government set policies shouldn't be stepped on either congressman dana rohrabacher from california thank you so much for joining me i hope you come back again thank you. well a new report by human rights watch claims that a december drone strike in yemen might have violated rules that president obama himself set to regulate there yet at least twelve people were killed in

a strike that was carried out by the u.s. military's joint special operations command the first reports about the strike claimed that it was a wedding procession full of civilians who were killed no no no the military said it was an al kind of group but then the military backtracked after human rights groups started digging into the story and then it acknowledged that it was a wedding procession after all that was hit however the military says that it was most of the people that actually died were in fact militants that were in that procession but here's what the new report says it says human rights watch found the convoy was indeed a wedding procession that was bringing the bride and family members to the groom's hometown the procession also may have included members of a q a p also known as peninsula although it is not clear who they were or what was their fate the report went on to say humans rights watch it found no evidence and the obama administration has provided none that the individuals taking part in the wedding procession posed an imminent threat to life in the absence of an armed conflict

killing them would be a violation of international human rights law joining me now to talk about some of this report to and the overarching issues when it comes to u.s. drone policy is ben swan the founder of fence one dot com man thank you so much for joining me now first of all i want to get your impressions of this new report do you think that it will actually change anything. well i hope for that it will but i'm del feel that it will at the same time look the obama drone strike policies becoming almost infamous in that there is all this rhetoric that goes out there from the old president himself from the administration from the military from the cia we have so much rhetoric and yet nothing ever changes in terms of the policy the policy seems to be completely lawless no matter what new rules they put into place no matter what memo seem to be sent out nothing really changes the policy itself is lawless under our rule of law regardless of any small changes they might make to it now president obama promised more transport transparency from the drone

program in his national defense speech that happened back in may and yet the us has a policy to not talk about drone strikes to not even acknowledge that they have it if he wants americans to support this program as being effective and legal and as being necessary why not talk about it. because it's in the legal it's not necessary and it's not effective i think when you really get down into the nitty gritty of what this drone strike policy consists of you've have stories exactly like the one you're talking about look you have a wedding procession in yemen the administration says we know that members of a.q. a.p. are there. launched this drone strike they killed a wedding party family members relatives friends say there were no al qaeda members there and you wiped out this entire group of people because your intelligence was bad because you and your mr mark and we see this happening over and over again so the reason you can never really truly sell this to the american people is because when you say that you're now going to have

a policy that's transparent and you bring transparency to a drone strike policy immediately anyone who takes a look at it will say well this is a terrible policy but consider the fact that when a drone hits a target it blows up about a square block that's about the amount of space that is hit when the actual drone strikes and as a result of that you have so much collateral damage associated with drone strikes that you would never be able to sell this as effective and necessary and even a reasonable process i'm glad that you made that analogy to kind of help people understand just how impactful drone strikes really are with that block radius so let's focus on what's going on in game at the moment now the bureau of investigative journalism says between fifty nine and sixty nine strikes have happened in yemen resulting in the deaths of dozens of civilians and even children is the u.s. shifting attention from pakistan to gaming at this point with these drone strikes in your opinion. well the they are but they're also moving drone strikes to mali

they're moving them to somalia right now if you take somalia pakistan and yemen those three countries there are something like about one hundred in twenty children who have been killed in the last few years as a result of drone strikes that's children alone we have thousands of people who are dying who are just referred to as collateral damage and again that's the problem here when you go to the american public with these numbers and say less than two percent of the time less than two percent of the time the intended target is actually killed ninety eight percent of the time you miss ninety eight percent of the time you're blowing up and killing civilians and children and women i mean this is a policy that just reeks of stumbling over itself logan and the other thing that's important here the president when he talked about creating this new or kinder gentler drone strike policy and he has talked about this where they've moved it away from the cia and they've moved it to the military where the department of justice when it comes to u.s. citizens will have to draw up a case every new step that they take in this process doesn't make the drone strike

policy any more effective nor does it make it any more legal because the entire system is illegal in terms of how we conduct these strikes there's no declaration of war in any of these countries in yemen in somalia and pakistan and yet we are constantly barraging their people with drone strikes it's lawless. and it's won a founder of the band swan dot com website thank you so much for joining me and for weighing in on this really sensitive issue. thanks so much for having me. well let's head over to sochi now where athletes are entering the final weekend of competition before the closing ceremony on sunday let's take a look at the leaderboard challis the u.s. leaves with the medal count with twenty seven russia is just one behind with twenty six medals followed by canada norway the netherlands and germany now the talk of the town today is all about the semifinals of men's ice hockey the u.s. took on canada hoping to have a better outcome than the u.s. weapons hockey team i was trying to earlier by our tease richard line front from

sochi he filled us in on the latest in the u.s. canada hockey snatch. it was a double disappointment really for the united states against canada or over the last two days canada losing a bit of royals from north america ones or nothing in the men's semifinal that came hot on the heels of losing merican women losing to canada's women free to two in overtime the second time obviously that. the united states has lost a candidate in the women's section after losing of course in vancouver in two thousand and the same for the men as well very of course lost in vancouver as well free to sidney crosby goalie in overtime giving the katie famous big cherry four years ago not a fortune for the americans we had a much vaunted all friends coming into this time with the canadians twenty goals in four games but unfortunately just couldn't solve the canadian mind carey price of

the montreal canadiens who stopped thirty one shots for a shot. the americans just weren't able to generate the orphans and they have managed to in the previous four matches and one goal was good enough for canada in the end scored by jamie benn of the dallas stars as he deflated the shot past quick to give canada some big trees united states i'll play off against spin learn from the wrongs made all while canada move through. point all while they'll play sweden who want gold in two thousand and six it is another bitter loss for the u.s. i know i've just being a hockey fan myself but what other events hand were handed out today and what a witch medals were actually given out. oh is a great success for united states for women slalom. shifrin one gold second gold for america. so far but shifrin only eighteen years old. she left

a field in a weight really to claim that gold medal for the united states also the u.s. claims a silver in the men's five thousand meter short track relay losing out to be eventual winners russia and it was really was a great. day for the russians in the short trying speedskating led by a big surround the south korean who turned to compete for russia two years ago. going on to win the five hundred meters to claim yet another gold medal for his adopted country and then just a little about a half hour later russia hold of the united states to claim gold in five thousand meters relay and also for ukraine well obviously the country's been. in the midst of a political crisis which has really affected some of the athletes have decided to return home but once it did stay they managed to claim their first gold all of these sorts here lympics in the women's biathlon four by six relay now we saw

a really impressive opening ceremony any hints about what the closing ceremony will look like. obviously we are sure closing ceremonies being come down kept under wraps very secretive nothing's been given away about what actually might happen but i do have one piece of information about julie chu the women's ice hockey player. who's just completed four for lympics she will be carrying the flag for the united states at the closing ceremony while she has a degree from harvard and so i was a very well educated and but unfortunately she was unable to go gold medals for her impressive career which will end with three silver medals and one bronze r.t. is richard ben thank you russia thank you so much. all right that's going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america or check out our website or to dot com slash usa and follow me on twitter

at mike and underscore lopez stay tuned next. first of all victoria nuland did not make a five billion dollar investment in ukraine that's rubbish second of all let's talk about russia's russia's investment russia cuts gas prices to support you in a cold rich russia is buying ukrainian child blogs so the ukrainian government with the not scary scenario here goes on your years on serial no good if you don't get your facts straight ok there eurobonds russia once again i half facts straight i'm very much so i'm saying is that russia is expanding billions and billions of

dollars to bring ukraine into the ration union if the majority of ukrainian people don't want to do that you made your point it's russia's fault was i agree with such a snail that russia could to russia's actions could result in the breakup of ukraine is absolute. nonsense victoria nuland comments demonstrates america's lip service to the concept so freedom and democracy. got a quote for you. it's pretty tough. because they were it's not a story. but if this guy like you would smear that guy stead of working for the people most issues the mainstream media were pretty much on the right right was a vision by. the.

over there i'm aaron a this is boom bust and these are the stories that we're tracking for you today. happy friday first and foremost now first up we look at money laundering and the age of crypto currencies and how the laws have clearly not yet caught up with the alleged crimes. then we have absalom work president and c.e.o. of merck investments on today's show he's talking all things master economics you won't want to miss my interview with him finally in today's big deal i'm joined by the one the only of ms abigail martin the breaking the set host sits down with want to discuss the disturbing trend is actually produced in banker suicides had to get serious there for a second it's rocking the financial world and we're taking a closer look at it it won't.