From AP:
Ukrainian delegates to an international security conference in Warsaw this week complained about a Russian photo exhibition depicting the war in Ukraine from a Russian perspective.
Ukrainian Embassy spokeswoman Yulia Borodiy said Friday that it was "yet another example of the cynical information warfare that Russia is waging against Ukraine."
The photos were taken by Andrei Stein, a Russian who was killed in August while being embedded with the pro-Russian rebels.
They were displayed at Warsaw's Sofitel Victoria hotel, near an area where the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe convened for a two-week conference. The photos went up Tuesday and were removed Thursday, a day earlier than planned, after the Ukrainians complained.
Via Reuters:
A German member of the European Parliament said on Friday she had been barred from entering Russia when she tried to attend a court hearing there for a Ukrainian woman army officer.
Rebecca Harms, co-chair of the Greens group in the parliament, said she believed she was on a secret Russian blacklist that could contain the names of other politicians who had supported sanctions against Moscow over Ukraine.
Harms flew to Moscow on Thursday intending to observe a Friday hearing in the case of Nadezhda Savchenko, a Ukrainian army officer seized by pro-Russian rebels in June while she was fighting with a pro-Kiev militia in eastern Ukraine.
Harms said that on arrival she was made to wait for four hours before being denied entry, and flew back to Brussels.
"There is an official decision in the Russian government. They see me as an unwanted, non-desired person and I had to sign a document that I don't try to enter Russia. Otherwise, it would be seen as a criminal act," she told a news conference.
Worth reading:
These frozen boundaries mean that Ukraine shares its borders with Russian-occupied Crimea, where Russia is bolstering its military, and Transnistria, the breakaway Moldovian state where some 1,500 Russian peacekeepers are stationed.
Re-upping this because it's such a telling graphic. Note that "Russia's regular army started invasion in Ukraine" on August 24.
YATSENYUK SAYS UKRAINE WILL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES RECALL NATURAL GAS SUIT FILED IN STOCKHOLM -- Interfax
ITAR-TASS quotes Ukrainian Energy and Coal Industry Minister Yuriy Prodan as saying the price of natural gas proposed in talks by the European Union -- $385 per 1,000 cubic meters -- should not be dependent on the Russian government's intervention.
From Reuters on today's "buffer-zone" talks:
Talks began on Friday to mark out a 30-km (19-mile) buffer zone between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the country's east, but Moscow was coy about its role and denied that Russian military officials had taken part.
A statement by the military in Kiev said a Ukrainian team met a 76-member group of Russian officers north of the major Ukrainian city of Donetsk to work on establishing the zone, designed to put government and separatist forces out of striking range of each other.
"Today at 0800 a working group ... began its work. Representatives of the Ukrainian side, a monitoring group from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)and 76 Russian servicemen took part," a statement said.
An OSCE spokesman in Kiev, Michael Bociurkiw, said monitors from the 57-nation security and rights watchdog had observed Ukrainian and Russian military officers at preliminary talks in the town of Soledar.
Effectively: "We were there. We watched and listened. We're here to help. Please end the bloodshed."
From our correspondent in Brussels, @RikardJozwiak, via the newsroom:
BRUSSELS -- The European Union, Ukraine, and Russia have agreed on an interim solution for natural gas flows which could prevent energy shortages in both Ukraine and EU countries this winter.
Speaking after a trilateral meeting in Berlin, EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Ukraine must pay $2 billion to Russia by the end of October and another $1.1 billion at the end of the year for outstanding bills.
If Moscow receives the 2 billion at the end of October plus a prepayment for new gas at $385 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, Russia will deliver 5 billion cubic meters of gas to Ukraine.
If Kyiv wins its case at the Stockholm Court of Arbitration next year, it doesn't have to pay more than the $3.1 billion it is expected to pay by the end of 2014.
If Russia wins, Kyiv has to pay an additional $2.1 billion.