This ends our live blogging for June 14. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Russia begins handing out passports to Ukrainians from conflict zone:
By RFE/RL
Russia has begun handing out Russian passports to Ukrainians from separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, a move condemned by Kyiv as "legally void."
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to simplify the process for Ukrainian citizens in the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions to get Russian citizenship just days after Volodomyr Zelenskiy won the country's presidential runoff on April 21. The move was slammed in Ukraine and abroad as an attempt to undermine Zelenskiy.
According to Russian state media, more than 60 Ukrainians from Donetsk and Luhansk were reportedly handed Russian passports at a ceremony in Russia's Rostov region on June 14.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said the Russian move won't "have any legal consequences and won't be recognized by the Ukrainian side and the world," a statement quoted by Ukrainian media said.
Ukraine has threatened to revoke the citizenship of those who accept Russian passports through the program.
Earlier this week, the European Union threatened that it would not recognize Russian passports obtained through what it denounced as an illegal method.
Giving Russian citizenship en masse to people in Ukrainian regions "runs counter to the spirit and the objectives" of the cease-fire commitments, the EU said in a statement.
Russia's Interior Ministry has received 12,000 passport applications under the program in the Rostov region, the state-run TASS news agency reported.
Zelenskiy has mocked the passport offer, telling Ukrainians not to bother since Russian citizenship means "the right to be arrested for peaceful protests," and "the right not to have free and competitive elections."
Russia-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions for the past five years.
Some 13,000 people have been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by the United Nations. (w/112.international, dpa, and TASS)
Brussels to drop criticism of controversial education law:
By Rikard Jozwiak
BRUSSELS -- A draft statement expected to be issued at an upcoming EU-Ukraine summit will express Brussels' continued recognition of Ukraine's European aspirations while dropping criticism of the country's education law, according to a copy of the draft seen by RFE/RL.
The statement, which was approved by EU ambassadors on June 13 and subsequently sent to Kyiv for further remarks, says that "we acknowledged the European aspirations of Ukraine and welcomed its European choice, as stated in the association agreement."
The same sentence was present in the final communique of last year's EU-Ukraine summit but some EU member states, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, have recently been reluctant to commit to such positive language regarding future EU enlargement -- most notably in the statement celebrating the 10th anniversary of the bloc's Eastern Partnership in May 2019, where acknowledgment of the European aspirations of the bloc's eastern neighbors was omitted.
In previous EU-Ukraine summit statements there have also been remarks about Ukraine's 2017 education law, pushed mainly by Hungary, which believes that the law restricts the right of Ukraine's ethnic Hungarian minority to be educated in their native language.
Kyiv maintains the law is meant to ensure that all Ukrainian citizens can speak the state's official language, and it denies that the law is discriminatory.
The spat has prompted Budapest to block all meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission -- the key format for bilateral cooperation between Kyiv and the Western military alliance -- at all levels above that of ambassadors for the past two years.
During the negotiations with fellow EU member states, Hungary, however, welcomed the new Ukrainian administration's promise to look into certain aspects of the education law and agreed not to mention the issue in the statement, according to sources speaking on condition of anonymity,
But the summit statement is critical of certain rule-of-law issues, mentioning that there is an "urgent need to re-criminalize illicit enrichment and to ensure the necessary independence and effective functioning of all anti-corruption institutions" and adds that "effective rule of law, good governance, and economic opportunity are the best means to tackle foreign influence and destabilization attempts."
The annual summit is scheduled just ahead of Ukraine's snap parliamentary elections on July 21. A day after his inauguration on May 21, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a decree disbanding parliament and called the early vote.