We are now closing the live blog for today. You can keep up with all our ongoing Ukraine coverage here.
RFE/RL's news desk has issued this item on the gas talks in Brussels:
European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has announced that substantial progress was reached in today's talks between representatives of Ukraine and Russia on gas supplies in Brussels.
Oettinger said as part of tentative deals, Ukraine planned to purchase some 4 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia before the end of this year.
Oettinger also said Ukraine would pay $1.4 billion of its debt to Russia for gas supplies already received before the end of October and another $1.6 billion by the end of this year.
The head of Russia's delegation to the talks, Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak, said the price of gas for Ukraine would be $385 per 1,000 cubic meters, $100 less than Russia was demanding just weeks ago.
Novak said that price would be in force from October 2014 until late March 2015.
Novak added the EU should take responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine pay its $5.3-billion debt for gas to Russia before the end of 2014.
Oettinger announced another meeting would be held in Brussels on October 29.
(Reuters, TASS, Interfax)
"The Economist' has been blogging about the controversy surrounding former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski's claim that that in 2008 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed to Poland's then-prime minister that they divide Ukraine between themselves:
A Kremlin spokesman has called the story “nonsense”, and without corroboration, it is hard to say whether an offer was in fact made. But the revelation has set off a bomb in Polish politics. The vision of larger powers carving up weaker ones is inflammatory here: the country has itself been partitioned twice, once in the 1790s by Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and again in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And although there is nostalgia in Poland for cities like Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and Lviv in western Ukraine, which were Polish before the second world war, there is no significant irredentist sentiment. Unlike Hungary, which pines for territories lost after the first world war, modern Poland has reconciled itself to its post-1945 borders.
Mr Sikorski has tried to back away from his comments, tweeting that they had not been “authorised”—a Polish peculiarity that gives interviewees the right to check or change quotes. In a chaotic news conference on Tuesday, Mr Sikorski, now the speaker of the Polish parliament, avoided answering most questions about the interview. He later explained that Mr Putin’s proposal seemed “surreal” at the time, as it came before Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008, which made Russian expansionism more tangible. But the revelations could damage his own reputation and that of Mr Tusk, a popular leader who will take over as president of the European Council in December. Mr Tusk's visit to Moscow in February, 2008 was part of a Polish attempt to warm ties with Russia, an effort that initially appeared to pay off. But if Mr Tusk already knew about the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions, that policy of rapprochement could appear to be naïve.
Read the entire article here