Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
Russia to move 2018 presidential vote to day marking seizure of Crimea:
By RFE/RL
Russia is preparing to move the date of the 2018 election that is expected to hand President Vladimir Putin a new term from March 11 to March 18 -- the day Russia celebrates its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
The State Duma approved a bill on the date change on April 12 in the first of three votes on the issue in the lower house of parliament. It is certain to pass.
Russian law says that presidential elections are held on the second Sunday in March unless that is a working day, in which case the voting must be held a week earlier.
The authors of the bill said that March 11 was likely to be a working day after the March 8 International Women's Day holiday. But instead of holding the election a week earlier, they proposed March 18.
Observers suspect the Kremlin hopes holding the vote on March 18 will boost turnout and attract more votes for Putin because that was the date, in 2014, on which he signed a treaty that Moscow claims made the Crimean Peninsula part of Russia.
Kyiv, the United States, and most other countries reject that assertion. They consider Crimea, which Russia seized after sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by 100 states, to be part of Ukraine.
Putin, in power as president or prime minister since 1999, has not announced plans to run for a new six-year term but is widely expected to do so. (w/RIA Novosti, Interfax, TASS)
Trump adviser Manafort to register after lobbying for Yanukovych:
U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman will register as a foreign agent for lobbying work he did on behalf of pro-Russian political interests in Ukraine, his spokesman has said.
Paul Manafort's decision to register comes amid investigations by the FBI and Congress into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia.
Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said on April 12 Manafort's lobbying for ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's party between 2012 and 2014 was not done on behalf of Russia.
Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014 amid massive protests against his rule.
By registering retroactively with the Justice Department, Manafort will be acknowledging that he failed to previously disclose his work as required by U.S. law.
Maloni said there was nothing improper about Manafort's political consulting for Yanukovych's political party, including how he was paid, and the lobbying ended before Manafort began working on Trump's campaign in March 2016.
Manafort resigned from Trump's campaign in August after revelations that he was paid millions of dollars to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych and his party.
AP reported that U.S. prosecutors have been looking into Manafort's work for years as part of an effort to recover Ukrainian assets stolen after Yanukovych fled the country. (AP, Reuters)