Good morning.
A few news items from overnight:
-- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Ukraine next week to show U.S. support for the government as fighting spikes with pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
-- A lawyer for Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian military pilot who has been on a hunger strike in a Russian jail since mid-December, says a new charge has been filed against his client.
Barring any major developments, that ends the live blogging for today.
Our D.C. correspondent Carl Schreck flagged this. Are Russian rebels standing up the Contact Group?
The Special Representative of the CiO to the Trilateral Contact Group, Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini, wishes to emphasize that her representatives have been waiting in Minsk since yesterday morning in order to prepare for a meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group with representatives from certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.