Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

There has long been a pattern in Bangladesh. Descent leads to disappearances. A new report

tries to measure just how often the country's security forces are involved with making

opposition voices simply vanish and the numbers are troubling.

And little more than 10% of the people who have been to space have been women,

largely because of health regulations imposed by space agencies.

We examine how those rules are changing as plans for wider celestial explorations are shaping up.

But first, tomorrow Ukraine will mark its 30th anniversary of independence from Russia,

but what's happening today shows just how fraught that relationship is these days.

Ukraine's president has invited representatives from 45 countries, including many European leaders

to the capital Kiev. His hope is to refocus the world's attention on Russia's annexation of Crimea.

The Crimean Peninsula was gifted from the Soviet Union to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Krushchov.

Shishank-Joji is the economist's defense editor.

And then if you fast forward, it became part of the independent Ukrainian state in 1991.

Now in 2014, as Ukraine looked like it was moving closer to the West, Russia invaded,

it sponsored rebels in eastern Ukraine, and it essentially grabbed and annexed the entirety

of Crimea in what was the first change of borders in Europe by force since World War II.

And what is the situation in Crimea now?

Well, Moscow is sort of struggling to maintain the welfare of Crimea.

You know, there's two and a half million people there.

Fresh water has become a big problem because Ukraine has built a dam across the North Crimean canal.

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