Here's an update from our news desk:
The United States has signed an agreement providing Ukraine with $2 billion in loan guarantees to help it with "near-term social spending" this year.
The loan agreement was signed in Kyiv by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko.
The European Union earlier this month made a similar pledge of 1.8 billion euros ($2.1 billion) to strengthen Ukraine’s economy.
After the signing, Lew said the United States was prepared to step up sanctions against Russia if necessary.
On January 27, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed by phone the importance of finalizing a "robust package of financial support" for Ukraine.
The two also spoke about the "significant increase in violence" in eastern Ukraine.
The White House says Obama and Merkel agreed on the need to hold Russia accountable for its support for the separatists and failure to fulfill its commitments under a peace agreement.
Earlier on January 27, EU leaders asked their foreign ministers to consider possible new sanctions on Russia when they meet January 29.
(Reuters and AFP)
As Russian-backed rebels make gains in eastern Ukraine, battlefield videos are raising concerns that war crimes are being committed.
RFE/RL's Glenn Kates has been looking into the matter:
A spate of videos uploaded to YouTube claim to show victories by Russian-backed separatists during intensified fighting in eastern Ukraine.
They may also provide graphic evidence of war crimes.
One recent video shows seven Ukrainian soldiers lined up against a wall after falling to separatists in the eastern city of Krasnyy Partizan. Lying next to the seven captives are two men who appear to lie mortally wounded and another two who are dead.
Later in the video, another dead soldier is shown lying a few meters away.
The footage is being viewed by some as circumstantial evidence that the four fallen soldiers were executed in front of the wall after surrendering.
A summary of the allegations made on the Ukraine@war blog points to single bullet holes in the wall, precisely where the heads of the fallen captives would have been; fresh blood on the ground; and a bullet wound through the face of one of the dead.
Read more here
Thomas L. Friedman has written a pretty uncompromising op-ed piece for The New York Times on the Ukraine crisis. Here's a taster:
ZURICH — Last March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, supposedly in defense of Russian-speakers there, was just like “what Hitler did back in the ‘30s“ — using ethnic Germans to justify his invasion of neighboring lands. At the time, I thought such a comparison was over the top. I don’t think so anymore. I’d endorse Mrs. Clinton’s comparison purely for the shock value: It draws attention to the awful things Putin is doing to Ukraine, not to mention his own country, whose credit rating was just reduced to junk status.
Putin’s use of Russian troops wearing uniforms without insignia to invade Ukraine and to covertly buttress Ukrainian rebels bought and paid for by Moscow — all disguised by a web of lies that would have made Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels blush and all for the purpose of destroying Ukraine’s reform movement before it can create a democratic model that might appeal to Russians more than Putin’s kleptocracy — is the ugliest geopolitical mugging happening in the world today.
Ukraine matters — more than the war in Iraq against the Islamic State, a.k.a., ISIS. It is still not clear that most of our allies in the war against ISIS share our values. That conflict has a big tribal and sectarian element. It is unmistakably clear, though, that Ukraine’s reformers in its newly elected government and Parliament — who are struggling to get free of Russia’s orbit and become part of the European Union’s market and democratic community — do share our values. If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine’s new democratic experiment and unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be in danger.
Read the whole article here
Here is the latest map of the military situation in Donbas -- issued by Ukraine's National Defense and Security Council (click image to enlarge):
Another update from RFE/RL's news desk:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has issued a new warning to Ukraine to stay out of NATO.
In an article for a Serbian magazine that was posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website on January 28, Lavrov said that "to prevent further splits in Ukraine, it is of fundamental importance that it retain its nonaligned status.
Last month, Ukraine scrapped a law that had declared it neutral and prevented it from joining any military alliance.
The law had been passed in 2010 during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted last February after months of protests over his decision to reject tighter ties with the EU and move closer to Moscow instead.
Kyiv and NATO accuse Russia of providing direct military support to pro-Russian separatists in a conflict that has killed more than 5,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April.
President Petro Poroshenko predicted last month that Ukraine would be ready to join NATO in 5-6 years and suggested a referendum would be held on the issue at that time.
(Reuters, Interfax)