If you've been regularly following the live blog, you'll know that there had been much speculation yesterday that the self-styled leader of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic Aleksandr Zakharchenko was going to resign at a news conference. As it turned out he denied that this was going to happen and he also had some rather incendiary comments to make about the cease-fire. Here are some translated quotes from RFE/RL's news desk:
"Let me say right away that I did not submit my resignation and at this moment I am not going to resign. So everything that the mass media has published is not really true."
"I declare: No one under any circumstances can force me to give an order to retreat. I consider all the territory [of Donbas] currently under control of Ukrainian authorities temporarily occupied and treat it accordingly. The cease-fire had been agreed so that Ukraine could understand that the conflict cannot be resolved through war and that they have an opportunity to leave all our illegally occupied territories calmly and peacefully."
"I don't know how the cease-fire is holding here or if it is holding at all. As prime minister I now have to go to the scene of shelling. You know, I have recently been to one and you won't believe it but I have a growing desire to pick up a machine gun, go to [Donetsk] airport and send a bullet through someone with my own hands."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet in Paris on October 12 with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, according to a U.S. State Department annoucement. There is no word what will be on the agenda.
Sergei Glazyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin's economics adviser, told Russia's TASS news agency it is "inevitable" that Ukraine will default in the near future.
"The dynamic of the balance of payments shows that Ukraine, in the immediate future, will not be able to service its state obligations independently," Glazyev said. Assistance from the European Union and the United States will be insufficient to make up the shortfall, he added.
He said as well that it will be a "global," not a "selective" default.
Earlier Glazyev estimated it would take $120 billion to stabilize Ukraine's economy.
Here is a map of the military situation in eastern Ukraine today, issued by Kyiv's National Security and Defense Council (click map to enlarge):
In an interview with Kazakhstan's 1612 Internet television channel posted on October 5 Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka flatly condemned Russia's bid to redraw international borders in Europe.
Lukashenka argued that once the process of rearranging borders according to historical claims begins, there is no end to it -- and Russia might end up disappearing if the borders of the medieval Mongol-Tatar Yoke are revived.
"Then we would have to give Mongolia to Kazakhstan and someone else would get practically all the territory of Russia and Western Europe and Eastern Europe -- except for Belarus," he said. "They made it to us somehow but they didn't bother us. So what is the point of returning to what was in the past? We can't be dicing up the borders again. "
He added that Europe's current borders are reinforced by numerous international agreements that cannot be ignored and should not be nullified.
Although he was speaking mostly of the current conflict between Kyiv and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, his observations seem equally applicable to Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March, to Russia's recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Russia's support of the separatist region of Transdniester in Moldova.
Watch the video here (in Russian):
Russian rocker Andrei Makarevich, who has been under assault in Russia for giving concerts for displaced persons in eastern Ukraine earlier this year, will not be able to give a scheduled lecture at Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok later this month.
The event organizer cited being "under pressure" to cancel Makarevich's lecture, which was ironically titled "What Is Beauty? How To Help People Whose Opinions Differ From Yours."
UPDATE: Makarevich has announced he will (try to) give this lecture in St. Petersburg on October 28 and 29.
Some more photographs, this time from RIA-Novosti, of the airport in Donetsk:
Time for some cross promotion. If you haven't been checking out RFE/RL's "The Power Vertical Blog" live feed on Russia, you should give it a try. There is a lot there with a bearing on the situation in Ukraine, of course.
Russia's state-controlled Vesti TV is reporting that Natalya Poklonskaya, the de facto prosecutor in the Ukrainian region of Crimea that was annexed by Russia in March, has a new hair color:
BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg is at a briefing at the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Official there has said Russia continues to be concerned by the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and says OSCE mission in Ukraine is not paying enough attention to the "alarming events" in western and central Ukraine.