Some updates from the OSCE monitoring team in Ukraine:
A couple of items from our news desk:
Tymoshenko's Party Gathering Briefly Interrupted By Strip Protest
A conference organized by Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party in Kyiv was briefly disturbed by a protester on June 15.
Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and opposition leader, was on the podium preparing to address the audience of the New Course For Ukraine forum when a young man approached her and offered her flowers.
The man then briefly took off his T-shirt, revealing the message "The New Course of Ukraine" written on his back and accompanied by a thick red arrow pointing to his bottom.
Tymoshenko reacted to the incident with humor, smiling and telling the audience, "It was impromptu, but it will make our forum livelier."
Tymoshenko, who served as prime minister in 2005 and 2007-10, has said that Batkivshchyna intends to run in both the parliamentary and the presidential elections scheduled for 2019.
Based on a live broadcast on Facebook
This one's from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
Ukrainian Protesters Call For Boycott Of FIFA World Cup In Russia
A small demonstration was held on June 14 outside the European Union representative's office in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, calling for a boycott of the FIFA World Cup in Russia.
Protesters cited Russian aggression against Ukraine and drew particular attention to the hunger strike by Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Russia on terror charges widely condemned as politically motivated.
"A blood-soaked championship is taking place in Russia. Sentsov's hunger strike has lasted for a month," one female protester told an RFE/RL camera crew as she drew a sign in chalk on the sidewalk where the protest was staged.
"It's four years since they shot down a [Malaysian Airlines plane]. The war is continuing. Russia is now hosting delegations from European countries at the football championship, with enormous pathos, as if nothing [else] was happening in the world, as if it were not a country which has locked up an enormous number of Ukrainian political prisoners," she said.
Among European countries, only Britain and Ukraine are boycotting the World Cup, although England's soccer team and fans are participating in the games.
However, as the protest was occurring in Kyiv, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on Russia to "immediately and unconditionally" release Sentsov and other Ukrainian citizens it said were "illegally detained."
Sentsov was arrested in Crimea in 2014, after Russia seized the Ukrainian region. He has been on hunger strike in a Russian prison in the far-northern Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region since May 14.
Sentsov is demanding that Russia release 64 Ukrainian citizens he considers to be political prisoners.