Video from Reuters. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko visited Ukrainian troops near the town of Izyum just outside the former rebel stronghold of Slovyansk on July 8. After inspecting weapons seized from separatist militants, Poroshenko told reporters there will be no street fighting in Donetsk. He called on pro-Russian rebels to lay down their arms and said he was committed to "decentralization" for the regions.
From our news desk:
Ukraine is demanding that Russia immediately release a female military officer who was captured by pro-Russian separatists last month.
Media reports say Nadiya Savchenko has been transferred to a detention center in the Russian city of Voronezh.
That information has not been confirmed by Russian officials.
In a statement on July 8, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry called Savchenko's reported transfer to Russia "yet another proof that terrorists" are operating in eastern Ukraine in cooperation with Russia's secret services.
"By kidnapping of Ukrainian citizens in our country," the statement said, "the Russian side violates not only all the norms of the international law, but also the basic rules of decency and morality."
The ministry demanded that Moscow bring to justice all those responsible for Savchenko's "illegal trafficking."
Savchenko, 31, a senior lieutenant in the Air Force, has been serving in Ukraine's armed forces for 10 years.
Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot kidnapped by separatist forces and reportedly transferred to Russia, first came to international attention when she was featured by the United Nations Development Fund in 2009 as an example of UNDP's work supporting gender equality in Ukraine.
From their profile:
-- Nadiya Savchenko has fought for a career as a pilot with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. After being refused entry into the Kharkiv Air Force University in 1998, she entered the Armed Forces and served as a radio operator and a landing forces soldier. She reapplied to the Air Force University after six years and learned that a special authorization from the Defense Minister was necessary.
In the end, Nadiya graduated from the Air Force University and became a pilot. Until recently, a career for women in the army was limited. Now the Ukrainian Minister of Defense has an adviser on gender issues who is responsible for ensuring equal rights and opportunities for women and men in the Ukrainian military, and in 2010 the Minister introduced two orders removing restrictions for women to hold managerial positions in the Ukrainian military.
Interfax reports that three-way gas talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the EU are set to resume in the second half of July.
Yuriy Prodan, Ukraine's energy and coal industry minister, said July 9 that he had "no information" about a precise date.
Russia's Gazprom yesterday announced that Kyiv had failed to meet its June deadline for gas payment and that its total debt now stands at almost $5.3 billion.
Ukraine has said it will pay the debt if it is recalculated at a lower price of $326 per 1,000 cubic meters.
Russia's bill, which includes Ukraine debt stretching back to 2013, is based on a price of $485 per 1,000 cubic meters, which came into effect in April.
Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee, has confirmed that Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko is being held in Russia and has been accused of involvement in the killing of VGTRK journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin in Luhansk.
Interfax cites Markin as saying Savchenko "crossed the Russian border without papers disguised as a refugee."
He says it was later found that she was a suspect in a criminal inquiry into the journalists' deaths on June 17.
Savchenko, a graduate of Ukraine's Air Force Academy and a first lieutenant in the Ukrainian Army, was captured in an ambush near the city of Schastye on June 18.
Her captors later released her video interrogation on the internet.
Savchenko is currently being held in a detention facility in Voronezh.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister has expressed its "resolute and categorical protest" over Savchenko's detention in Russia, and has called on the international community to condemn "Russia's unlawful actions."
People in Donetsk complaining they can no longer get cash from ATMs.
A visual tour of the hastily abandoned separatist headquarters in Slovyansk City Hall... lots of St. George ribbons lying on the floor.
Ukrainian Prime Mininster Arseniy Yatsenyuk says it will take 8.1 billion hryvnia ($691 million) to restore damaged infrastructure in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. "We will think about where to get that money."