Some more possible saber-rattling over the Baltics it seems (from RFE/RL's news desk):
Estonian officials say a Russian military aircraft violated their country's airspace over the Baltic Sea this week.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mari-Liis Valter said that the ministry summoned the Russian ambassador on June 26 to formally protest the incursion.
Valter says a Russian Antonov An-26 aircraft strayed from its reported flight plan on June 22 and entered Estonian airspace without permission near the island of Vaindloo.
She said the incursion lasted for less than a minute.
The island is near a corridor Russian military planes fly through to get from the St. Petersburg area to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
The nations around the Baltic Sea have reported repeated airspace violations by Russian aircraft in recent years amid increasing military activity by both NATO and Russian forces in the region.
(AP)
In this video report, the BBC looks at the desperate plight of people forced to regularly cross the Ukrainian front line near rebel-held Luhansk:
Here is another update from our news desk:
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on June 26 that an annual human rights report released by the United States was politically motivated and ignored rights violations by Ukraine.
"As previously [the report] is a creation abounding with politicized evaluations and coarse ideological cliches," Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Interfax.
"The methodology of the report is detached from reality and based on an arbitrary 'ranking' of a state's level of democracy," he said.
The United States released its annual human rights report on June 25, saying that the political system in Russia was becoming "increasingly authoritarian" and that Moscow had passed new measures to suppress dissent.
(Interfax, Reuters)
We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow morning, you can keep up with all our ongoing Ukraine news coverage here.