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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

18:07 27.2.2018

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18:15 27.2.2018

18:17 27.2.2018

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18:24 27.2.2018

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Our update to the Pussy Riot in Crimea story:

A leading member of the Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, has been briefly detained in Russian-occupied Crimea for the second time in two days.

An RFE/RL correspondent reported that police detained Alyokhina and local activist Aleksei Yefremov in a cafe in the Crimean city of Simferopol on February 27.

The move came after they were confronted by several men in traditional Cossack military uniforms who called themselves members of "Crimea's self-defense."

Human rights activists later said that Alyokhina was brought to a police station.

RFE/RL correspondent Anton Naumlyuk said that Alyokhina and Yefremov were taken to the police station to give statements about the incident in the cafe, and not because the protest they staged in support of jailed filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.

Naumlyuk said that Alyokhina subsequently left the police station.

On February 26, Alyokhina and two other Pussy Riot members, Olga Borisova and Aleksandr Sofeyev, were detained in different parts of Simferopol and taken to a local medical office for tests. It was not clear why the tests were performed.

The trio was later released, and for some time Borisova and Sofeyev's whereabouts were unknown.

But RFE/RL's Naumlyuk later reported that Borisova and Sofeyev had already returned to Moscow.

The trio had said it planned to stage a protest on the Ukrainian peninsula in support of Sentsov.

In August, Alyokhina and Borisova were detained and fined after staging a protest near the remote prison in Siberia where Sentsov is serving a 20-year prison sentence on terrorism charges that he and supporters say are groundless.

Sentsov is from Crimea, the Ukrainian region that Russia forcibly seized in March 2014.

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