The tweet on top, from pro-Putin media entrepreneur Konstantin Rykov, says "Patriots wait for Banderovtsi in Moscow." The tweet on the bottom, from Savik Shuster, a popular Ukrainian TV host, says, "fascists on Pushkin Square await peaceful demonstrators."
Supporters of pro-Russian separatists are also apparently gathering in Moscow's Pushkin Square, where the antiwar march is set to begin at 4PM Moscow time.
Latest from Ukraine, via our news desk:
A Ukrainian military spokesman says Kyiv will not pull back its troops from the front line in eastern Ukraine until a new cease-fire is fully implemented.
Andriy Lysenko, the spokeman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said on September 21 that two soldiers were killed and at least eight injured in the past day despite the cease-fire.
He added, "If [Ukrainian forces] are withdrawn, it will be done simultaneously with the Russian troop withdrawal."
Russia denies having troops in Ukraine.
Lysenko said insurgents fired at Ukrainian forces in 22 places on September 20.
Those reports came the same day Ukrainians and insurgents in Minsk forged an agreement to create a buffer zone on the front line.
The deal would entail each side halting advances and pulling back heavy weapons, something Lysenko said Kyiv is currently not comtemplating. (AFP and AP)
Vitaly Milonov, who is best known for introducing the law against so-called "gay propaganda" in Saint Petersburg, here being confronted by protesters. "Remind me when Ukraine was a state," he says. Questioning the existence of a Ukrainian nation (separate from a Russian one) is a common refrain of the Russian far-right.
Saint Petersburg protesters outside Kazan Cathedral as police continue to warn protesters that their rally in unsanctioned.
Far-right Saint Petersburg deputy Vitaly Milonov apparently has arrived at the antiwar demonstration as a counter-protester. Crowd shouts, "shame."
Police have warned participants over loudspeakers that their rally is unsanctioned and they risk arrest.
Russian news agency Interfax is reporting that Ukrainian forces are pulling back from certain areas in the east "to avoid encirclement":
The Ukrainian Armed Forces and other formations have left a number of towns and villages in Donbas to straighten out the line they control and also to get entrenched on new positions, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (SNBO) announced.
"With the purpose of straightening out the line that is currently controlled by the Ukrainian military it was decided to transfer our formations to new positions, to fortify them for further control over the situation and to avoid a situation in which our military could be surrounded," spokesman for the SNBO information and analysis center Andriy Lysenko said at a Sunday briefing.
That was his commentary on the report that the army left the town of Zhdanivka and several other communities in Eastern Ukraine.