We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow morning, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.

In case you missed it, here's a interesting feature by RFE/RL's Robert Coalson on the conditions some workers claim to have encountered while building the Kerch Strait bridge:

'Like Being A Slave': Workers On Russia's Bridge To Crimea Report Abuse, Deceit

At the end of July, construction worker Vyacheslav Abdullin quit his job and headed home on foot – a 600-kilometer trek from the Kerch Strait to his hometown in the Ural Mountains region of Russia.

After a month laboring on a project that President Vladimir Putin has made clear is extremely important to the Kremlin -- a bridge linking Russia to the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 -- Abdullin had nothing to show for his pains except harrowing stories of deception and abuse.

Working on the Kerch Strait Bridge "is really like being a slave," Abdullin told RFE/RL.

"You can't stand, and you can't sit. Even if you have to wait half an hour for additional materials, if you are standing around, you will be fired. If you sit down, you are fired. You have to be doing something, even if you are just moving boards from one pile to another or tossing stones back and forth," he said by phone from Zlatoust, a city near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. "You have to look busy all the time. If not, you are fired."

The laborers were not allowed to take off their shirts in the hot summer sun, and sometimes they worked whole days without being given water to drink, Abdullin said.

He was not given any of the 47,000 rubles ($718) per month he was promised.

The Kerch Strait Bridge is Russia's top-priority infrastructure project. At a cost of at least $4.5 billion, the 19-kilometer car-and-rail bridge will tie Russia to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed from Ukraine after sending in troops and staging a referendum dismissed as illegitimate by 100 countries in a UN vote.

Read the entire article here