Another update from our news desk on the reported shelling near Mariupol:
Pro-Russian separatists reportedly shelled the position of Ukrainian government troops in southeastern Ukraine today, despite an almost two-month-old cease-fire agreement.
Authorities in the port city of Mariupol say military positions located near the village of Talakovka were targeted by conventional artillery and Grad rockets that were fired from the separatist-controlled region of Donetsk.
Casualties were reported among troops.
The cease-fire agreement signed in early September ended most fighting between the two sides -- although battles at the Donetsk airport, in Mariupol, and in villages near the city of Luhansk continue on an almost daily basis.
The UN says more than 3,700 people have been killed in six months of fighting between government forces and separatists in eastern Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes.
(Interfax, UNIAN)
And here's another video, this time of a prisoner exchange, in which the Kyiv side handed over eight separatist fighters for seven Ukrainian servicemen and four civilians:
Here is a news item on Crimea from RFE/RL's Armenian Service
The Grozny Air civil aviation company, based in the Russia's Chechnya region, is pressing ahead with plans to launch regular flights from Yerevan to Crimea, despite protests from Kyiv.
Timur Shimayev, an executive officer for Grozny Air, told RFE/RL on October 29 that the firm's inaugural flight to Crimea is scheduled for November 17.
But Ukraine's Ambassador to Armenia, Ivan Kukhta, told reporters in Yerevan on October 29 that any commercial flights between Yerevan and Crimea must first be approved by Kyiv.
Kukhta's statement came five days after a spokesman for the Armenian government's Civil Aviation Department, Ruben Grdzelian, said that a Russian regional airline had not been allowed to launch flights between Armenia and Crimea since the Ukrainian peninsula was annexed by Russia in March.
Moscow's annexation of Crimea has been condemned as illegal by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations General Assembly.
Here is a Reuters video issued by our multimedia department in which Ukrainian Prime Minister gives an indication of his intentions following the October 26 parliamentary elections:
A leader of self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic in the east of Ukraine, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, speaking to residents of the eastern Ukrainian town of Makiivka today, as he campaigns ahead of November 2 poll rejected by Kyiv and in defiance of Ukrainian national elections held on October 26, which were won by pro-Western parties:
"I want our pensioners to be able to travel to Australia at least once a year and to shoot 15 or so kangaroos on a safari. I want my compatriots to work to live and not live to work. That's what I want. [I want] an average salary to be higher than in Poland and in Poland it is $1,370. That's what I want. I want to live in a big, rich, free country."
"If you want to say there is peace tomorrow -- I hope for that. I am preparing for peace very hard: I am rearming troops, forming new units, digging trenches, and preparing for peace because peace is the main goal we need to achieve. Which road we take to get there -- sorry, but that's the road we are compelled to walk down."