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)
Here is today's map of the military situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
Here's another:
Candidates are being registered for the local elections planned next month in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic:
Ukrainian TV channel drops show prompting censorship accusations
Kiev (dpa) - A popular television show in Ukraine was dropped by the broadcaster shortly before it was due to air, prompting the presenter to Saturday accuse Kiev of censorship amid mounting concerns over press freedom in the country.
Savik Shuster, the presenter of the political talkshow Shuster Live, hit out with claims that pro-Western President Petro Poroschenko was no better than his corrupt predecessor Viktor Yanukovych.
The 1+1 broadcaster cited public unrest as a reason for axeing the "extremely tense and politicized" show.
Poroshenko on Wednesday 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 Ukrainian leader later signed an order revoking the ban against several journalists of British, Spanish and German citizenship.
Yanukovych, the pro-Russian former leader, was ousted amid mass protests in Kiev that called for closer ties with the European Union.