Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with this update from our news desk:
European Commission chief Jean Claude Juncker will hold talks in Brussels with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the tattered ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the commission said on August 21.
An escalation in fighting is threatening a peace deal signed in February in the Belarusian capital of Minsk between the pro-Western Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists.
The August 27 talks with Juncker follow meetings scheduled for August 24 in Berlin between Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who were both present at the Minsk agreement's signing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin -- who persistently denies any Kremlin involvement in the Ukraine fighting and calls Russian soldiers discovered in the war zone "volunteers" -- has been notably omitted from the round of meetings.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine has been Europe's deadliest since the 1990s wars in the Balkans, killing more than 6,400 people and driving 1.4 million from their homes.
(AFP)
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Friday, August 21. Thanks for reading. Check back here tomorrow morning for more of our continuing coverage.
Shopping Spray: Loutish Russian's Beer-Biting Patriotism
As the food-destruction craze over banned Western goods continues in Russia, the St. Petersburg Orthodox Union of Cossacks and a very large former band member have joined in.
The group went to a local store of the French supermarket chain Auchan -- which was recently targeted by Russian authorities for "systematic" inspections -- in search of prohibited imported goods. The resulting spectacle, accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and captured on video, looks like performance art.
The star of the video is Stas Baretsky, a former member of rock band Leningrad who is notorious for his oversized red sportcoat and outrageous combativeness on live television.
In it, he claims he is a newly appointed minister of culture for the Cossacks Union. Strolling through the shop, he asks an employee why a foreign brand of beer is "on the most visible display." Baretsky then bites into the can and tears it in two, spraying beer all over the place:
Read more here.