Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with this item from our news desk on a worrying development in Crimea:
Jehovah's Witnesses Detained, Targeted By Authorities In Crimea
Russian-installed authorities in Crimea have detained several members of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the religious group.
The U.S.-based denomination said on March 20 that authorities in the occupied Black Sea peninsula staged raids on homes in Yalta and Alupka and detained six members of the group for questioning. The group identified one as 34-year-old Artyom Gerasimov.
A statement from the regional bureau of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed a man had been taken in custody but did not release his name.
"It was determined that a 34-year-old Yalta resident had organized the work of a local cell of Jehovah's Witnesses, including meetings, preaching, and disseminating the ideas of the aforementioned religious sect," the service was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
The Crimean Peninsula has been occupied by Russia since 2014 when Moscow seized the territory from Ukraine and illegally annexed it.
Members of the Jehovah's Witnesses have been under intense pressure across Russia since the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that the group is an "extremist" organization.
The group has reported a growing number of raids and detentions of its adherents across Russia in recent months.
In February, a Danish member of the group was convicted of extremism by a court in the southern city of Oryol and sentenced to six years in prison.
Earlier this week, an Oryol prosecutor asked a court for a three-year prison sentence against another adherent, Sergei Skrynnikov.
A verdict is scheduled to be announced in Skrynnikov's case on April 1.
The group said officials in the Far Eastern city of Magadan have also staged a series of raids on four homes of Jehovah's Witnesses there on March 20, seizing cell phones, computers, flash cards, notebooks, and other materials.
Headquartered in the U.S. state of New York, the Jehovah's Witnesses organization has long been viewed with suspicion by some governments for its members' views about military service, voting, and government authority in general.
The group says it has about 170,000 adherents in Russia.
With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service
This ends our live blogging for March 20. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Ukraine imposes sanctions on Russians over Kerch Bridge, seizure of naval vessels:
Ukraine has imposed economic and other sanctions on hundreds of individuals and entities for their alleged roles in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia over the Crimea region and the war in eastern Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko on March 20 signed the order to implement the sanctions against 294 legal entities and 848 individuals, overwhelmingly Russian, as approved by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine the previous day.
Some of the sanctions target people and entities connected with the construction of the Kerch Strait bridge between Ukraine's annexed Crimea region and Russia.
Others are applied against people and entities believed to have played a role in the detention in November 2018 of two Ukrainian naval vessels and their 24 crew members by Russia near the Kerch Strait. The 24 Ukrainian sailors are still being held by Moscow.
Still others are applied to people and entities that organized and held unauthorized and unrecognized "elections" within the separatist entities occupying parts of Ukraine's Luhansk and Donetsk regions in November 2018.
Others included in the new sanctions list are accused of violating Ukrainian travel legislation by visiting Crimea or of playing a role in the relocation or use of museum collections belonging to Ukraine.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine have been at a nadir since Moscow annexed Crimea in March 2014 and began providing military, political, and economic support to the separatist formations waging a war against Kyiv in parts of eastern Ukraine.
Some 13,000 people have been killed in that conflict, which the International Criminal Court ruled in November 2016 was "an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation." (UNIAN, Ukrinform, and TASS)