That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Saturday, July 4. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage.
UEFA Give Dnipro The Green Light To Return Home
Europa League runners-up Dnipro will be allowed to play their European club matches back in their hometown of Dnipropetrovsk after UEFA added it to their authorized list of venues.
However, the club will have to play their games at another venue again if the military situation around the city worsens at any time in the future.
Gryhoriy Surkis, the president of the Ukraine FA and a vice-president of European soccer's governing body, said on July 4 that UEFA would allow the venue to be used, as long as there was a Plan B in place.
Following the recent military upheavals in the eastern regions of Ukraine, UEFA only sanctioned the capital, Kyiv, and Lviv in the west of the country as safe enough to stage matches with Dnipropetrovsk, around 390 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, banned from staging games.
Based on reporting by Reuters
Ukraine tackles graft with new US-style police force
Kiev, July 4, 2015 (AFP) -- Some 2,000 young, athletic, US-trained Ukrainians on Saturday swore oaths to enforce the law -- and resist the temptation to take bribes -- at the launch of a new police service in Kiev to replace a notoriously corrupt force.
Hands on their hearts, the new recruits assembled on a central square sang the national anthem, watched by President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko and the US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
Stamping out graft among the police has been a key priority of Ukraine's new pro-Western government.
"Believe me, your job will be no easier than that of soldiers in the Donbass," Poroshenko told the recruits, referring to the eastern region where government forces are locked in a 17-month conflict with pro-Russian insurgents, in which over 6,500 people have died.
"The main danger zone," Poroshenko told the officers, who will patrol the streets and monitor traffic, was "not where the bullets are whizzing but where the banknotes are rustling" -- a reference to the backhanders often sought by traffic police particularly to turn a blind eye to transgressions.
The head of the new force is a 28-year-old former commander of a pro-government volunteer battalion, who spent time on the frontline in the east.
The successful candidates were selected from over 33,000 applicants and received training from US police. Around one in five are women.
Members of the previous force will be required to undergo tests to determine whether they have the fitness level necessary for patrols.
Deputy interior minister, Eka Zguladze, a Georgia native among several officials from Georgia and Baltic states to be given senior posts in Ukraine's new administration, spearheaded the shake-up of the force.
The US contributed $15 million to the effort, with Japan, Australia, Canada and other countries also chipping in funds.
Zguladze, who carried out similar reforms in Georgia under that country's former pro-Western president Mikhail Saakashvili, told AFP she had "the utmost faith" in the new officers.
"They are strong, they will succeed," she said.
The new service is to be progressively rolled out to other cities, including the southern city of Odessa, Kharkiv in the east and Lviv in the west.