Good morning. We'll start our live blog today with this Ukraine-related item from our news desk:
Flights between Ukraine and Russia will be banned starting this weekend despite a last-ditch effort by senior Russian officials to prevent the ban, Ukraine's infrastructure minister said on October 24.
"From October 25, there will not be air traffic with Russian cities," Minister Andrei Pivovarsky told Russian news agencies.
Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Brussels on October 23 as part of a Moscow-led effort to prevent the Kyiv-initiated ban on flights between the countries.
Russian Transportation Minister Maksim Sokolov told reporters that his country would continue to push for the bans to be removed, arguing that Ukraine should go along with this because 75 percent of air travelers between Russia and Ukraine are Ukrainian.
Ukraine announced late last month that it would ban flights from Russia starting on October 25. Russia quickly retaliated with a tit-for-tat ban that would go into effect on the same day.
Ukraine made the announcement despite several weeks of relative calm in the country's two eastern-most regions, which have been at the center of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists.
(dpa, TASS)
A tweet on tomorrow's local election from the U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv:
RFE/RL's Katya Gorchinskaya has been looking at the mood in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv ahead of this weekend's local elections:
Coffee houses buzz with the din of outsiders. The streets are filled with the hustle bustle of locals going about their daily business. Living statues dotting the main square add a human element to the city's medieval past.
Lviv exudes an air of a place that is going in the right direction.
The sight of soldiers drinking in bars is one of the few signs of the war simmering on the opposite end of the country, some 1,200 kilometers away. Thriving tourism belies the economic hardship faced by Ukraine as a whole. And the city's place both in history and on the map -- it lies just an hour's drive from the EU border -- give it a decidedly Western feel.
"I feel comfortable here, I love living and working here," says Viktoria Bryndza, a young professional from Lviv. "Even the proliferation of tourists sort of strokes my ego."
The country's GDP is set to contract by 9 percent this year, but you wouldn't guess it by walking around Lviv. New restaurants open every month, and posters advertise new residential developments.
And while anger and disappointment rise nationwide, the mood in Lviv is one of cheerful confidence and joie de vivre.
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Read the entire article here