Court arrests director of youth camp where fire killed three girls:
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
ODESA, Ukraine -- A court in Ukraine's Black Sea port city of Odesa has arrested the director of a youth camp, where fire killed three girls on September 15.
The Kyiv District Court in Odesa on September 18 placed Petros Sarkisyan in a detention center for two months without possibility of bail on suspicion of violations of fire safety regulations that led to the deaths.
Authorities said on September 16 that the fire swept through the camp's two-story, wooden building shortly before midnight on September 15.
Police said that 42 children were inside the building at the time of the fire.
After extinguishing the fire, rescue workers found the remains of two girls and said that a third girl was unaccounted for.
Fragments of a third body that are believed to belong to the missing girl were found later.
Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko, on September 18, expressed condolences to the relatives of the three girls and Odesa residents.
He also said that he has put the investigations of the tragedy under "special control."
On May 27, President Petro Poroshenko visited the Viktoria youth camp, and as media reports said then, "personally inspected and reopened" the camp after renovation works.
Ukraine and other former Soviet nations continue to be plagued by frequent deadly fires due to aging infrastructure and often slipshod fire-safety practices.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with the latest news on Pavlo Hryb (frpm RFE/RL's news desk):
Kyiv Diplomats Visit Ukrainian Teenager Hryb Held In Russia
Ukrainian diplomats have visited a Ukrainian teenager held in Russian custody on terrorism-related charges for the first time since his arrest.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maryana Betsa wrote on Twitter that Ukrainian consuls visited Pavlo Hryb on September 18.
Betsa said that Ukrainian physicians have not been allowed to examine Hryb.
"We demand doctors' access," she wrote.
Hryb's father, Ihor Hryb, said earlier that his son has a medical condition, which he did not specify, and needs special treatment and drugs on a regular basis to avoid a possible hemorrhage.
Hryb, 19, went missing in late August after he traveled to Belarus to meet a woman he met online in what his relatives believe was a trap set by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
The FSB subsequently informed Kyiv that Hryb was held in a detention center in Russia on suspicion of abetting terrorism, without giving any details.
Ihor Hryb has said his son was openly critical of Russian interference in Ukraine on social media.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on September 8 protested Hryb's detention and demanded that Moscow grant consular access to the teenager "and explain in detail all of the reasons for his detention."
The ministry condemned what it called Russia's "persecution of Ukrainian citizens in Russia and elsewhere, groundless detentions of Ukrainians, violation of their rights to have fair trials, and their convictions on fabricated and politically motivated charges."
Kyiv and Moscow have been locked in a standoff over Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and Moscow's backing of armed separatists in a war that has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.