Here is today's situational map of eastern Ukraine by the National Security and Defense Council:
LATEST from our news desk:
OSCE monitors at the Gukovo checkpoint in Russia's Rostov region near the border with Ukraine have reportedly vacated the area due to safety concerns.
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) spokesman Vasily Malayev says the OSCE mission left the site on August 4 amid continuing military operations by Ukrainian government forces against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Malayev added that more than 400 Ukrainian troops, including some 160 Ukrainian border guards, had entered Russian territory on August 4, after the Russian side allowed them to cross the border at the Gukovo check point.
According to Malayev, the Ukrainian troops will be transferred to the control of the Ukrainian government at the Matveyev-Kurgan checkpoint in the near future.
It was not immediately clear why the Ukrainian soldiers crossed into Russian territory.
But Ukrainian reports said the soldiers fled into Russia to escape artillery barrages being fired at them from Russian territory. (RIA Novosti, ITAR-TASS, and Interfax)
Investigators have returned to the site of the Malaysia Airlines crash in eastern Ukraine:
Ukrainian businessman Vyacheslav Konstantynovsky recently made headlines when he sold his Rolls-Royce to buy equipment for Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. He spoke to our Russian Service about his motivation for doing so. Read more here (in Russian).
According to our Ukrainian Service, the Russian airline Dobrolot, the low-budget carrier of Aeroflot, has suspended its flights to Crimea after being hit last week with EU sanctions (in Ukrainian):