Sea Breeze Military Drills Bring U.S., NATO To Ukrainian Shores
Some 2,500 U.S., Ukrainian, and NATO troops are taking part in Sea Breeze 2015, a two-week military exercise in the Black Sea and Ukraine's coastal regions. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said the training is meant to boost trust and security in the region, which has been shaken by instability since Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. (RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service)
We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow morning, you can keep up with all our Ukraine news coverage here.
Here's another update from our news desk:
Ukraine has accepted the International Criminal Court's (ICC) jurisdiction to probe possible war crimes committed during Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said in a letter accepted by the Hague-based ICC that the court can investigate for the "purpose of identifying, prosecuting, and judging perpetrators and accomplices of [criminal] acts committed" in Ukraine since February 20, 2014.
But the ICC said in a statement that accepting the court's jurisdiction "does not automatically trigger an investigation."
Kyiv had previously given the ICC the right to probe alleged crimes committed between November 2013 and February 2014, when pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after mass protests.
Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine one month later between Russian-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces.
The UN says more than 7,900 people have been killed in the fighting.
The expanded ICC probe could consider allegations by Ukraine and several Western governments of Russia's direct involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine, something Moscow denies.
(Reuters, AFP, and AP)
Here's an extended item on Moscow's accusation that Arseniy Yatsenyuk fought in Chechnya in the 1990s:
A top Russian law enforcement official has accused Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of fighting alongside Chechen rebels and torturing and killing Russian soldiers during Moscow’s bloody war with separatists in the 1990s.
Aleksandr Bastrykin, the powerful head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, made the assertions in an interview published September 8 on the website of the Russian government’s official daily newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Yatsenyuk worked as a lawyer, a banker, and an economist before his appointment last year as prime minister following the ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally, amid mass protests.
His official biography gives no indication of military service.
Bastrykin claimed in the interview that Yatsenyuk "participated in at least two armed conflicts" in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, in late 1994 and early 1995, "as well as in torture and executions of Russian army servicemen" in January 1995.
He also claimed that the late Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who declared Chechen independence from Russia in 1991 and led separatists in the first Chechen war until his death in a Russian missile strike in 1996, awarded Yatsenyuk and other alleged Ukrainian volunteers medals for “killing Russian servicemen.”
Yatsenyuk’s spokeswoman, Olha Lappo, responded to the allegation on social media by “encourag[ing] the Russian regime to undergo psychiatric evaluation.”
During the time period indicated in Bastrykin’s allegations, Yatsenyuk was studying in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, near the Romanian border, according to the Ukrainian premier’s official biography.
Following Yanukovych’s flight from Ukraine in February 2014, Russia has repeatedly portrayed the pro-Western leadership that subsequently came to power as fascist sympathizers and dangerous extremists.
Russia’s federal forces launched the first of two brutal wars against separatists in Chechnya in December 1994.
The Kremlin has since reigned in the mainly Muslim republic in the North Caucasus by giving Chechnya’s strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, the freedom to run the southern region as he see fits in exchange for fealty to Moscow.
Bastrykin claimed in the interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta that Yatsenyuk returned to Ukraine from Chechnya via Georgia in “early 1995” together with a “group of journalists.”
Ukraine has fought a bloody war with pro-Moscow separatists in the east of the country that has killed more than 7,900 people since fighting broke out in April 2014.
The conflict erupted a month after Russia seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a moved deemed illegitimate by a large majority of UN members.
The United States and the EU have punished Russian officials and companies with several rounds of visa and economic sanctions in response to the Crimean standoff and the war in eastern Ukraine, plunging Moscow’s ties with the West to lows unseen since the Cold War.