And here's a Manafort update filed overnight by our news desk in Washington:
U.S. Law Firm to Pay $4.6 Million In Settlement Over Manafort Ukraine Lobbying
A U.S. law firm has agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle claims by the Department of Justice that it violated lobbying laws by failing to register work it did for Ukraine’s government.
The Department of Justice said in a statement on January 17 that Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP made "false and misleading statements" after its foreign agents registration unit (FARA) contacted the firm in 2013 in connection with the case.
The work was done in conjunction with Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman and overlaps with the Special Counsel investigation by Robert Mueller that is looking at Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Ukraine’s government at the time was considered pro-Russia.
"Law firms should handle inquiries from the federal government the same way they would counsel their clients to: with appropriate due diligence to ensure the honesty of their response," Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in the statement.
"Skadden’s failure to do so, and reliance on only the representations of the lead partner on the matter, hid from the public that its report was part of a Ukrainian foreign influence campaign."
A Dutch attorney for the law firm who once worked closely with Manafort was sentenced last year to 30 days in prison and given a $20,000 fine for lying to Mueller's investigators about contacts with an official in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Alex van der Zwaan, the son-in-law of Russian billionaire German Khan, was the first person to be sentenced in Mueller’s probe.
Van der Zwaan was a lawyer in London for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 2012 when he carried out work for the Ukraine government through former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates and Manafort.
With reporting by The New York Times, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today, but pointing you in the direction of this feature by RFE/RL's Kyiv correspondent Christopher Miller:
Erdogan's Wrath Stretches To Ukraine, Leaving Turks In Fear Of Kyiv-Assisted 'Kidnapping'
KYIV -- Yunus Erdogdu has been afraid to leave the concrete confines of his apartment building on the outskirts of Kyiv since mid-July.
That's when Ukrainian authorities arrested and extradited within days of each other two fellow Turkish nationals-- a journalist and an entrepreneur -- whom Ankara alleges are linked to a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan more than two years ago.
Both men had Ukrainian work and residency permits. Yet both were denied the legally mandated five-day appeal period and quickly deported.
The repatriations were part of Erdogan's relentless campaign "in the East [and] in the West" to pursue supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based preacher and onetime Erdogan ally with a global network of schools and nonprofits as well as millions of followers.
The United States' failure to hand over Gulen himself has frayed relations between Washington and Ankara, but it has not deterred Turkish officials' aggressive pursuit of Gulenists elsewhere -- with dozens of the 77-year-old exile's alleged supporters nabbed and forcibly returned to Turkey since the attempted overthrow in 2016.
Such abductions have sent a powerful message to Erdogdu and others in the Turkish dissident community in Ukraine who are sympathetic to Gulen and his dissident vision for a tolerant, hard-working Turkish society.
The deportations from Ukraine, which shares a shoreline on the Black Sea with Turkey and has deepened cooperation with its government in recent years, has fueled speculation about a secret quid pro quo between the two countries' leaders and evoked comparisons to the CIA's extrajudicial abductions of terrorist suspects after 9/11.
Read more here
We are now closing the live blog for today, but we'll be back again tomorrow morning to follow all the latest developments. Until then, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.
Sea Tragedy Raises Donbas Coal Theft Claims
When a ship sank in the Black Sea with 3,300 tons of coal on board, Kyiv said Moscow was illegally exporting coal from areas of eastern Ukraine held by Russia-backed separatists.
Here's an item that our news desk filed earlier today:
Ukrainian Parliament Adopts Law On Religious Communities' Affiliation
KYIV -- The Ukrainian parliament has adopted a bill setting the procedure for changing the affiliation of religious communities in the country.
The January 17 vote in the Verkhovna Rada comes amid tension over the creation of an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the church was formally granted independence, or autocephaly, despite fierce opposition from Moscow.
A total of 229 Ukrainian lawmakers voted in favor of the amendment to the law on freedom of conscience and religious organizations, while 35 voted against it, and two abstained.
Under the proposed legislation, religious congregations will be able to vote to choose what teaching or branch they belong to.
The bill will become law once published in the official gazette.
A Ukrainian church linked with Russia, the Ukrainian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, has said that by the end of 2018 it had 12,092 parishes across Ukraine.
Efforts by Ukrainians to establish an independent church intensified after Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and began supporting separatists shortly thereafter in parts of Ukraine's eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.