Protesters block street near parliament with tents:
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
KYIV -- Ukrainian protesters in Kyiv who are demanding that President Petro Poroshenko enact anticorruption reforms or step down have blocked a main street near parliament with dozens of tents.
The tents were set up on Hrushevska Street and in Mariyinskyy Park outside the Verkhovna Rada, where some 4,500 protesters demonstrated on October 17.
With hundreds of protesters at the site on October 18 saying they will stay until their demands are met, National Police chief Serhiy Knyazev told reporters that the authorities did not plan to forcefully remove the tents.
"We do not want to repeat old mistakes. We want to secure the citizens' right to express their will," Knyazev said.
"Old mistakes" may have been a reference to deadly attempts to crack down on the Euromaidan protests that pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.
A tent camp set up on Kyiv's Independence Square was a prominent feature of the 2013-14 protest movement.
The rally on October 17 was spurred by disappointment in Poroshenko and his pro-Western government, which came to power after Yanukovych's ouster and is accused by critics of failing to root out high-level corruption.
At the rally, former Georgian President and Odesa region Governor Mikheil Saakashvili urged Ukrainian to press for Poroshenko to step down if he does not heed their demands.
Knyazev said that two police officers were hospitalized after scuffles that broke out when demonstrators started bringing tents to the site without police screening.
Knyazev's spokesman Yaroslav Trakalo said earlier that three protesters were also injured but did not need hospitalization.
Kyiv says two soldiers killed, four wounded in east:
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
Ukraine's military says that two of its soldiers were killed and four were wounded amid multiple cease-fire violations by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine on October 17.
Separatists forces violated the cease-fire 44 times in the previous 24 hours in Donetsk region, and Ukrainian forces returned fire 38 times, the military said in a statement on October 18.
The statement also said that militants used 82-120-milimeter mortars, antitank grenade launchers, and weapons used by infantry fighting vehicles.
Two other Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the Donetsk region on October 16.
Fighting between Kyiv's forces and the Russia-backed separatists who hold parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014.
Several cease-fire deals announced as part of the Minsk accords -- September 2014 and February 2015 pacts aimed to resolve the conflict -- have failed to hold.
The latest cease-fire was agreed on August 22 in a phone call between the leaders of Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine.