Negotiating Iraq's Crisis, Ukraine Simmers, World Refugee Day, and more

RFE/RL's Weekly Rundown, a concise look at our top stories this week:

# Negotiating Iraq's Crisis: U.S. and Iranian officials say they could consider cooperating in Iraq against the ISIL, but what form might that take? The dramatic advance by ISIL has sparked a blame game in Washington between current and former officials over whose policies are at fault. INFOGRAPHIC: Iraq's Complicated Ties.

# Iraq Analysis: Sergei Danilochkin, Director of RFE/RL's Arabic Service, Radio Free Iraq, recently discussed the challenges of covering the turmoil in Iraq on KBAI-FM's "Global Journalist" program, and correspondent Luke Johnson discusses U.S. intervention in Iraq on "The Bill Press Show" (starts at 1:20:45).

# Ukraine Simmers: As violence continues in Eastern Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko says that a weeklong unilateral cease-fire by Ukrainian forces will begin on June 20. Will Poroshenko's new chief of staff, media mogul Boris Lozhkin, emerge as the "anticrisis manager" that can get the government to focus on the tasks at hand without unnecessary power struggles? Speaking of Poroshenko's staff, a popular, but highly profane, slogan targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin took center stage after Ukraine's (newly) former foreign minister, Andriy Deshchytsia, was caught on video repeating the phrase. Good thing Ukraine's (newly) new foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, has a reputation as a skilled negotiator and a man capable of navigating the difficult diplomacy of both EU integration and Kyiv's shattered relations with Moscow, which has halted gas supplies to Ukraine – a major escalation of a dispute in which Russia's state-owned gas giant Gazprom is demanding that Kyiv settle its huge gas debt.

# Russia's Fringe: The Kremlin has been talking a lot about the "fascism" supposedly rampant in Ukraine, as members of Russia's ultra-nationalist fringe have been busy stoking the unrest in Ukraine's east. Is Eurasianism, Russia's latest messianic ideology a passing fad or a long-term project? Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki has been a favored target of Kremlin supporters, but a new claim, which spread widely on Russian news sites and social media, appears to have no basis in fact.

# Afghanistan's Election Fallout: As allegations of fraud in Afghanistan's runoff election pile up, protest movements have mobilized against what they see as systematic vote-rigging.

# The World's Displaced People: June 20 is World Refugee Day, and among the 50 million people who have been forced from their homes due to conflict, natural disaster, or other crises, are more than 220,000 Syrians who had sought shelter in Iraq's Kurdistan region, 50,000 residents displaced from fighting in Pakistan's North Waziristan, and thousands fleeing eastern Ukraine, including scores of Crimea's heroin rehab patients and addicts.

# INFOGRAPHICS: The World's Displaced People and Ukraine's Humanitarian Situation

# Combating Censorship In Uzbekistan: Radio Ozodlik journalists and others team up with Wikipedia to provide background and context to news for readers in Uzbekistan, where the site is blocked.

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