Here's a video from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service of a funeral service for guardsmen killed outside the parliament in Kyiv this week:
Members of Ukraine's parliament and National Guard attended a funeral service on September 3 for two guardsmen killed by a grenade thrown during violent protests. A member of the nationalist Svoboda political alliance has been arrested for the grenade attack.
Russia says it has spent around 60 million dollars on Ukrainian refugees, according to the current exchange rate. The head of the Russian Investigation Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, cited this figure during a meeting about "combating civilian human rights violations in southeast Ukraine."
"According to the data on expenditure on refugees from Ukraine … the Russian Federation suffered damage worth over 4 billion rubles," Bastrykin said.
Russia claims that it has given shelter to 2.6 million Ukrainians, one million of whom left Ukraine because of the conflict in Donbas. However, according to the UN, a total of over a million people left Ukraine for Russia.
In Artemivsk, in the Donetsk region, a retired woman has been holding a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin's policies. She sits at a central trolleybus stop in the city with a sign that has a photograph of Putin with a glass of wine in his hand along with the caption, "To idiots! Without you, I wouldn’t be here."
The woman, whose name is Oleksandra, has been coming to the bus stop for a few days now. She has decided that to hold the protest on a daily basis -- she promises to be at same spot every day from 10 a.m.to 11:30 a.m.
Oleksandra explained that an article on the way Putin "is destroying Russia" prompted her to protest. According to her, passers-by have had different opinions about her sign.
"Every day, I record the ratio," she says. "The amounts of people who support me, and those who say nothing, are equal. Thirty percent don't themselves understand what they are saying. I can’t even call this a reaction or aggression -- it's madness."