This looks like it could be big:
Minsk chimes in on Ukraine's energy needs, as our news desk reports:
Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that Minsk is ready to supply Ukraine with oil products.
Lukashenka's press service says the two presidents discussed the issue by telephone on August 4.
It said Lukashenka "stressed that Belarus understands the acuteness of this problem during the harvesting campaign and therefore, despite domestic needs, will assist Ukraine in ensuring its economy has oil products."
According to Lukashenka’s website, the Belarusian president also talked by phone with Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev on August 2 about how to help normalize the situation in Ukraine.
Ukraine is conducting a military offensive against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Belarus and Kazakhstan are considered close allies of Russia as members of a Moscow-led customs union and the Eurasian Economic Union. (with Reuters)
Here is today's situational map of eastern Ukraine by the National Security and Defense Council:
LATEST from our news desk:
OSCE monitors at the Gukovo checkpoint in Russia's Rostov region near the border with Ukraine have reportedly vacated the area due to safety concerns.
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) spokesman Vasily Malayev says the OSCE mission left the site on August 4 amid continuing military operations by Ukrainian government forces against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Malayev added that more than 400 Ukrainian troops, including some 160 Ukrainian border guards, had entered Russian territory on August 4, after the Russian side allowed them to cross the border at the Gukovo check point.
According to Malayev, the Ukrainian troops will be transferred to the control of the Ukrainian government at the Matveyev-Kurgan checkpoint in the near future.
It was not immediately clear why the Ukrainian soldiers crossed into Russian territory.
But Ukrainian reports said the soldiers fled into Russia to escape artillery barrages being fired at them from Russian territory. (RIA Novosti, ITAR-TASS, and Interfax)
Investigators have returned to the site of the Malaysia Airlines crash in eastern Ukraine:
Ukrainian businessman Vyacheslav Konstantynovsky recently made headlines when he sold his Rolls-Royce to buy equipment for Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. He spoke to our Russian Service about his motivation for doing so. Read more here (in Russian).