This ends our live blogging for August 30. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with some of the more interesting tweets that came in overnight:
And the pic in this tweet appears to depict the last few days of the tourist season in Crimea. Not exactly a bumper year, it seems...
Here's an item from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. What are the chances of yet more fisticuffs in the Verkhovna Rada today?
KYIV -- Dozens of Ukrainian lawmakers from the Radical Party and the Svoboda political coalition blocked the podium in the parliament on August 31, protesting the first vote on constitutional amendments aimed at decentralizing the government's powers.
According to the draft amendments, "a special law will regulate peculiarities of local self-government” in the districts which are being held by Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko submitted the bill to the parliament on July 15 after pressure from Western leaders to grant areas in eastern Ukraine some self-rule powers as promised in February's Minsk cease-fire agreement.
The pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine insist that the special status of the districts they control should be mentioned in the constitution.
Hundreds of activists protesting against the proposed amendments also picketed outside the parliament building in Kyiv on August 31.
Some demonstrators parked vehicles to block traffic on the streets in the government quarters of Kyiv.
(With reporting by UNIAN and Interfax)
It seems there's been a bit of a kerfuffle outside the Ukrainian parliament today over the decentralization bill. This is how the Kremlin-funded RT has been reporting it:
Meanwhile, this is another journalist's take: