A pro-Kyiv Luhansk regional administrator says shelling "by separatists" in the city of Popasna has resulted in an unspecified number of casualties, and has destroyed buildings and a bridge to the city, our Ukrainian Service reports.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have opened a criminal investigation against a Russian law-enforcement agency for allegedly supporting separatist and "terrorist" groups in eastern Ukraine.
The announcement on September 30 comes one day after Russia accused top Ukrainian political and military leaders as well as nationalist organizations of committing "genocide" against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian prosecutor-general said it has opened a criminal investigation against officials of Russia's Investigative Committee, the body investigating the alleged "genocide" by Ukrainian officials.
Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists have been fighting for five months in eastern Ukraine, leaving at least 3,000 people dead and causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.
Kyiv and Western countries accused Russia of supporting the rebels and sending troops and hardware, charges that Moscow denies.
A September 5 cease-fire has ended most hostilities.
Based on reporting by Reuters and UNIAN
Reuters flashes:
RUSSIAN ENERGY MINISTER REITERATES KIEV HAS TO REDEEM PART OF DEBT BEFORE GAZPROM RESTARTS GAS FLOWS TO UKRAINE
RUSSIAN ENERGY MINISTER NOVAK SAYS HOPES TO RESOLVE DISPUTE OVER GAS DEBT TIMETABLE WITH UKRAINE THIS WEEK
Masha Gessen (a former director of RFE/RL's Russian Service) for "The New Yorker" in a piece called "The Weight Of Words," on Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya "confronting the state."
This year, Ulitskaya became the de-facto head of Russian PEN, the writers’-advocacy organization, whose Russian chapter had long been quiet. Under her leadership, it quickly turned into one of the few voices in Russia criticizing the war in Ukraine; its revamped Web site has become a repository of antiwar articles and statements. That, in turn, has made her the object of attacks. In late August, the president of Russian PEN, the seventy-seven-year-old novelist Andrei Bitov, who had not been active in years, issued a vitriolic open letter accusing Ulitskaya of having staged a coup. A few days later, a large banner went up on one of Moscow’s central avenues, featuring portraits of five people—two rock stars, a journalist, and two writers, one of them Ulitskaya—next to an American flag, with the words “Are You Living Off Their Bucks?” Within a few months, Ulitskaya had gone from being too popular for the prosecutor’s office to tangle with to being someone too dangerous to be allied with.