Candidates are being registered for the local elections planned next month in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic:
Here's another:
Here is today's map of the military situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
NATO chief to visit Ukraine next week:
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg will next week make his first visit to Ukraine to hold talks with top officials and launch a joint disaster-management exercise, the alliance says.
He will travel to Lviv and Kyiv on September 21 and September 22 to hold talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and the parliament speaker.
He will also attend a meeting of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.
Ukraine is a key Western partner, but not a member of the 28-nation military alliance.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said last week that "a number of strategic documents" would be approved, notably paving the way for NATO to open an embassy in Ukraine.
The "Ukraine 2015" exercise will be based on "a technological disaster scenario which will also affect the civil population and critical infrastructure elements" throughout Ukraine, NATO said on September 18.
NATO has responded sharply to the Ukraine crisis and Russia's annexation of Crimea by increasing its readiness posture and rotating troops and equipment through its ex-communist eastern members to ease their fears that Moscow might encroach on them. (AFP, dpa)
Poroshenko signs order removing Western journalists from sanctions list:
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has signed an order to revoke a ban on several journalists of British, Spanish, and German citizenship.
The journalists include BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg and producer Emma Wells, both British, as well as German reporter Michael Rutz, who writes for Die Zeit.
Two Spanish journalists, Antonio Pampliega and Angel Sastre, who disappeared in Syria in July and are believed kidnapped by the Islamic State group, were also taken off the ban list on September 18.
Poroshenko on September 16 had signed a decree to ban about 400 people, including dozens of foreign journalists, from entering Ukraine on the grounds that they posed a threat to national security.
Most of the journalists on the list were Russian, and the measure was widely seen as a response to coverage of pro-Russian separatists in the country's east, whom the government has outlawed as terrorists.
The BBC called the measure a "shameful attack on media freedom."
Poroshenko had assured British Ambassador Judith Gough in a meeting on September 17 that he would remove the BBC journalists from the list. (dpa, Interfax, TASS)
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Friday, September 18. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage. Thanks for reading.