From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is visiting Moscow on March 5 for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
The Kremlin said the agenda of Renzi’s talks with Putin includes the conflict in Ukraine and the implementation of the February 12 Minsk II agreement, as well as the situation in Syria and Libya and the spreading threat posed by Islamic State militants.
The Kremlin said Medvedev’s talks with Renzi would include cooperation in trade and economic sectors, the implements of joint industrial and high-tech projects, and cultural interaction.
Trade between Italy and Russia, as well as some joint projects, has been affected by European Union sanctions that have been imposed against Russia for its role in eastern Ukraine’s conflict and its illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.
The European Union and the United States have threatened further sanctions if Russian-backed separatists carry out fresh attacks against Ukrainian government forces near the port city of Mariupol.
Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax
This ends our live-blogging for March 4. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Donetsk officials now say 33 miners dead:
Officials in the pro-Russian, separatist-held Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine said late March 4 that 33 miners were killed in an explosion in a coal mine earlier in the day.
The Donetsk administration said 17 bodies had been retrieved from the Zasyadko mine and another 16 bodies had been found and would soon be brought to the surface also.
Georgia's ex-president urges U.S. to arm Ukraine:
Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, now serving as an adviser to the administration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, has called on the United States to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons.
Speaking in front of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on March 4, Saakashvili said that Ukraine needs weapons, such as antitank weapons, to stall what he called the Russian advance.
He said that without weapons, there will be no country to reform.
The former president rebutted the argument that the United States should work with Europeans, saying that Germany was unlikely to agree to arming Ukraine.
Saakashvili predicted that Russia may seize more of the south and east of Ukraine, and try to destabilize the government in Kyiv.
Saakashvili was president when Russia and Georgia fought a war in 2008.
Freedom House has detailed rights abuses in Crimea:
The rights organization Freedom House released a new report on March 4 detailing rights abuses in the Crimean Peninsula since Russia "forcefully and illegally annexed" the Ukrainian territory in March 2014.
The report says Crimea's residents have faced increasingly grave, civic, political, and human rights violations.
Particularly affected were the Crimean Tatar population, which, according to Freedom House, has faced "infringement of property rights and intimidation of independent voices through selective use of law and physical force."
The report says the Kremlin has sought to suppress reporting of such abuses by creating a so-called "information ghetto" in Crimea through a crackdown on local and foreign media.
The report also notes many of these abuses have not been reported as "Western media attention shifted to the war in Ukraine's east" where government forces have been battling pro-Russian separatists for nearly one year now.