EU unlikely to agree next week to prolong Russia sanctions
BRUSSELS, March 13 (Reuters) - European Union leaders are unlikely to reach agreement at their summit next week to prolong economic sanctions on Russia that expire in July, a senior EU official said on Friday.
New sanctions on Russia are also off the table for now because EU governments want to give a chance to a fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine.
But some of the EU's 28 member states had pushed for an early decision on extending sanctions on Russia's financial, energy and defence sectors adopted in July last year over Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
While leaders will discuss sanctions at next week's summit, the senior EU official said a majority would probably want to hold over discussion of renewing the economic sanctions on Russia until July.
"What will be the final point we will see in the Council (summit) but I don't think there is unanimity at all for the rollover of sanctions, the sanctions that are due in July," the official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said.
By the Crimean Desk of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine -- Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers on the annexed Crimean Peninsula have detained an investigative journalist in the regional capital, Simferopol.
Colleagues of Natalya Kokorina, who works for the Center of Journalist Investigations in Simferopol, told RFE/RL that FSB officers searched her parents' apartment and detained her.
Her lawyer, Dzhemil Temishev, was not allowed to enter the apartment during the search.
Also on March 13, FSB officers searched apartment in Simferopol that belongs to the parents of another local journalist, Anna Andriyevska, and confiscated a computer belonging to Andriyevska's father.
Andriyevska moved to Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March last year.
The officers told Andriyevska's father she was being investigated over an article published last year which investigators claimed called for the overthrow of the Moscow-backed government in Crimea.
Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council (CLICK TO ENLARGE):
An excerpt:
KHARTSYZK, Ukraine (AP) - Seryozha colors in his drawing of a tank, lost in thought. Like many 7-year-olds in eastern Ukraine, he has trouble recalling a time before the war.
"They've always been shooting," he says, vigorously scratching with the brightest of pencils.
Yelena Nikulenko, the director of the children's home in the rebel-held town of Khartsyzk, says kids like Seryozha have been let down twice.
First orphaned or abandoned by their parents, they were then dumped by their new families when the Ukrainian government stopped paying benefits to foster families in separatist-controlled areas.
"On top of that, you have the war, the shelling, the fear," Nikulenko says. "It will be a scar for the rest of their lives, that's for sure."
The conflict that erupted in Ukraine last year between government troops and Russian-backed separatists has claimed at least 6,000 lives and displaced nearly 1.8 million people. The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that 1.7 million children on both sides of the front line have been harmed through lack of proper shelter, nutrition, medicine or schooling.
Read more here.