Good Morning. We'll start the live blog today with an update on Kyiv's claims that some heavy duty Russian military hardware made its way into Ukraine on Thursday evening:
The Pentagon's spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, says he has "no independent operational reporting" to confirm Kyiv’s claim that Russia sent an armored column into eastern Ukraine on November 6.
Kirby said the Pentagon can confirm "a continued presence " of unhelpful Russian battalion tactical groups "right across the border" in Russian territory that is "doing nothing to decrease the tension in the region."
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko says a Russian column with 32 Russian tanks, 16 howitzer artillery pieces, and 30 trucks of ammunition and soldiers, crossed into eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region on November 6.
He said another Russian column of trucks and mobile radar stations crossed into Ukraine at a nearby border point.
NATO says that if the deployments are confirmed, it would be further evidence of Moscow's direct military support for pro-Russian separatists who continue to fight Ukrainian government forces despite a September 5 cease-fire agreement.
(Reuters, AP, AFP)
We are now closing the live blog for today, but we'll be back tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you can keep up with all our ongoing Ukrainian coverage here.
Crimean leader Mustafa Dzhemilev sparked an Internet meme last month when he responded to comments by Czech President Milos Zeman in April, who said the West should recognize the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula. Dzhemilev said: "I was jailed for 3 years, after publicly opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And today, the Czech president asks me to accept the Russian annexation of Crimea."
Now his words have been translated into Czech and pasted on billboards in the Central European country, as you can see in this video from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service (natural sound):
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has just issued a flurry of rather defiant tweets in English. Here are a few of them: