Pope Francis talked about Ukraine in his Sunday prayer at the Vatican:
" In these last few days there have been significant steps in the search for a truce in the regions affected by the conflict in eastern Ukraine."
"But today I heard news that was less comforting. However, I hope that [both sides in the conflict] can bring relief to the population and contribute to the efforts for a lasting peace. I pray that, in the logic of the meeting, the dialogue that has been initiated will continue and will bear the hoped-for fruit."
The Facebook page of former Ukrainian Interior Minister and current Bloc of Petro Poroshenko leader Yuriy Lutsenko purports to name five NATO countries that agreed in Wales to send modern weapons and Western military advisers to Ukraine: United States, France, Poland, Norway, and Italy.
"The Wall Street Journal" highlighted a key element of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's media appearance on Saturday in which he said, "First of all, we do have the intelligence reports [on] what happened to MH17 and the reports are pretty conclusive."
Najib suggested that a fundamental task of investigators hoping to return to the crash site this week will be to "assemble physical evidence that can be brought to court when the time comes so that it can be proven beyond any doubt that the plane was shot down by a missile."
A VKontakte post from "Novorossia" fighter and former "defense minister" of the "Donetsk People's Republic" Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), who says that he's "well-informed" about what's happening in Donetsk but "unfortunately couldn't affect it right now."
I'll leave the parsing of Girkin's message to Leonid Ragozin and Pete Leonard:
Ukrainian defense spokesman claims that despite the shelling overnight, the situation in the city of Mariupol is "under control." It is a key port city along the highway to Odesa.
Eight hundred and sixty-four Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of Kyiv's "antiterrorist operations" in Donetsk and Luhansk, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports, quoting National Security and Defense Council spokesman Volodomyr Poliovyi. Another 3,215 have been wounded.