Here is today's map of the latest situation in the Donbas conflict zone -- courtesy of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (click image to enlarge):
Another Ukraine-related item from our news desk:
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has instructed the Transportation Ministry to consider retaliatory restrictive measures against Ukraine for banning Russian flights.
Russian government spokeswoman Natalia Timakova made the announcement on September 28.
The Ukrainian government said last week that it was banning flights by Russian airlines, primarily Aeroflot and Transaero, to Ukraine starting October 1.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said on September 25 that Russian transit flights to Ukraine will still be allowed unless they contain military equipment or military personnel.
Earlier this month, Kyiv blacklisted 25 Russian aviation companies as threats to its national security.
Kyiv-Moscow relations are extremely poor due to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in March 2014 and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
(Reuters, TASS)
On case you missed it, the BBC ran a nice story at the weekend, looking at how Kyiv's new-look police force is faring in Kyiv:
When police officer Valerie Voloshchuk puts on her smart navy uniform in the morning, twists her blonde hair into a neat bun and fixes her pearl earrings, she never quite knows what will await her on patrol.
The 27-year-old former lawyer and one-time air stewardess has been in this job only a few months.
And like the other fresh-faced recruits of Ukraine's new police force, she's been trained to deal with all sorts of trouble.
"It can be stressful at first," says Eka Zguladze, the Deputy Interior Minister who is almost as young and has transferred to Ukraine the lessons she learned when rolling out a similar police reform programme in Georgia a few years ago.
"For some, it's seeing death for the first time, or arresting an armed man, or coping with a small child who has swallowed his tongue before the medics arrive.
"But since the new force has been on Kiev's streets, there's not been one allegation of corruption."
It is very different from Ukraine's old "militsiya" police force who were more likely to harass you for a bribe than help maintain law and order.
Read the entire article here