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A portrait of slain separatist leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko hangs outside the Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre on September 2.
A portrait of slain separatist leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko hangs outside the Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre on September 2.

Live Blog: Ukraine In Crisis (Archive)

-- EDITOR'S NOTE: We have started a new Ukraine Live Blog as of September 3, 2018. You can find it here.

-- Tens of thousands of people gathered on September 2 in the separatist stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine to mourn a top rebel leader who was recently killed in a bomb attack.

-- Prominent Ukrainian historian Mykola Shityuk has been found dead in his home city of Mykolaiv, police said on September 2.​

-- Ukraine says it has imprisoned the man it accused of being recruited by Russia’s secret services to organize a murder plot against self-exiled Russian reporter and Kremlin critic Arkady Babchenko.

-- Ukraine and Russia are trading blame for the killing of a top separatist leader in eastern Ukraine.

-- Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the head of the head of the breakaway separatist entity known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, was killed in an explosion at a cafe in Donetsk on August 31.

-- The United States is ready to widen arms supplies to Ukraine to help build up the country's naval and air defense forces in the face of continuing Russian support for eastern separatists, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine told The Guardian.

-- The spiritual head of the worldwide Orthodox Church in Istanbul has hosted Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill for talks on Ukraine's bid to split from the Russian church, a move strongly opposed by Moscow.

*Time stamps on the blog refer to local time in Ukraine

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10:17 11.4.2018

U.S.-based democracy monitor Freedom House has issued its latest Nations In Transit report, titled Confronting Illiberalism.

Here's what they had to say about Ukraine:

Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan present the region’s highest risk of sliding into authoritarianism, the report says.

“While the window for fundamental reforms may not have closed in Ukraine,” the report says, political resistance to anticorruption reforms, attacks on civil society, and the media have seen Ukraine’s democracy score declining for the first time since 2014.

"It was a relatively small decline but it was meaningful and the main cause of the decline is very aggressive pressure on the civil society and on the independent media from government, from leading politicians. It's becoming unfortunately quite normal and standard in Ukraine to accuse civil society actors, NGOs, to accuse media of being antinational and unpatriotic," Nate Schenkkan, project director of Nations in Transit, told RFE/RL.

Read more about the report here.

20:50 10.4.2018

That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Tuesday, April 10, 2018. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage. Thanks for reading and take care.

20:24 10.4.2018

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