Good morning. As usual, we'll get the live blog rolling with a few tweets that caught our eye overnight:
We are now closing the live blog for today, but we'll be back again tomorrow morning to follow all the latest developments. Until then, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.
Here's another item from our news desk:
Ukraine Not To Receive EU Money As Kyiv Fails To Fully Meet Requirements
Ukraine will not receive the third tranche of the European Union's financial assistance as Kyiv failed to meet some of the EU requirements, the head of the EU delegation to Ukraine said.
Hugues Mingarelli said at a press conference at Oshchadbank in Kyiv on December 13 that Ukraine had met only 17 out of 21 preliminary requirements of the program for receiving the third tranche of 600 million euros ($705.5 million).
According to Mingarelli, the European Commission would assess Ukraine's need in external financial aid in upcoming months.
Under the program that ends in January 2018, Ukraine received two tranches totaling 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) out of 1.8 billion euros ($2.1 billion) of the financial assistance.
Mingarelli said earlier that the requirements Ukraine failed to meet included the abolition of a moratorium on the export of round timber, the fulfillment of conditions in the field of energy, fighting corruption and requirements in the field of trade as well as in social payments for immigrants.