We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume tomorrow, you can keep up with all our ongoing Ukraine coverage here.
Here's a sanctions-related update from RFE/RL's news desk:
U.S. President Barack Obama says the European Union should maintain current sanctions against Russia until it implements a cease-fire and peace deal agreed in Minsk in February to end the fighting in Ukraine.
"At a minimum we have to maintain the existing sanction levels until we've seen that they've carried out the steps that they're required to under the agreement," Obama told an April 17 news conference in Washington.
He said that “both Russia and the Ukraine must fulfill all the obligations” of the Minsk agreement.
UN officials say a dire human rights situation in parts of eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv has battled Moscow-backed separatists in a brutal year-long conflict, is likely to deteriorate further because of violations of the accord.
Obama added that "the international community needs to continue supporting Ukraine with robust assistance as it pursues economic and political reforms."
(with reporting by Reuters)
RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service has issued this video of the Lenin statue being toppled in Kramatorsk (natural sound, no subtitles):
The Amnesty statement linked to in that last tweet mentions the mysterious shooting of a pro-Russian journalist in Kyiv yesterday. RFE/RL's Daisy SIndelar has also been examining this murky case:
At 1:55 Moscow time on April 16, the Ukrainian National News agency posted a bulletinannouncing that journalist Oles Buzina had been shot dead.
At 2:05, Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Herashchenko confirmed the slaying on Facebook.And by 2:17, Russian President Vladimir Putin was already using Buzina's killing to attack Ukraine's "democratic" values during his annual call-in show with the Russian public.
"This isn't the first political killing we've seen. We've had an entire series of these kinds of killings in Ukraine," Putin said smoothly, responding to a moderator who interrupted the live television broadcast to announce Buzina's slaying. In all, just 23 minutes had passed from the first bulletin on Buzina's death in Kyiv to Putin's cursory condemnation in Moscow.
It's a turnaround some Ukrainian officials found remarkably rapid for a president who earlier this year took more than four days to comment publicly on the far more resonant assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov just outside the Kremlin walls.
Kyiv officials now allege that Buzina's killing was not only ordered at Russia's behest, but also purposefully timed to serve as seemingly impromptu anti-Ukrainian fodder for Putin's Q & A.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described Buzina's daytime slaying by two masked men on a central Kyiv street as a "deliberate provocation."
Herashchenko spoke more pointedly, describing Buzina as a "sacrificial victim" and noting that the call-in show's announcement about the journalist's death "was so carefully worded I got the impression they could have known about the tragedy in advance."
Read the entire article here
Here's an update from our news desk:
French President Francois Hollande will discuss the Ukraine crisis with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin during a visit to Armenia on April 24.
A source in Hollande's office said April 17 that Putin and Hollande will attend a ceremony in Yerevan marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
The meeting will come two days after Hollande meets Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Paris.
Relations between the two countries have been hit by France's decision to suspend the delivery of two Mistral warships to Russia as East-West tensions have mounted over the conflict in Ukraine.
Putin dismissed the spat on April 16, saying: "Of course not delivering the ships according to a valid contract is a bad sign, but from the point of view of supporting our defense capabilities, to tell you frankly, this has no importance."
(AFP, TASS)