From our news desk:
Germany, France, Poland Call For Efforts To End Ukraine Conflict
The foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Poland have agreed that there should be greater international efforts to reduce tensions in eastern Ukraine.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made the announcement on August 28 after talks with his French and Polish counterparts in the German town of Weimar.
More than 9,500 people have been killed in fighting between government forces and Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine’s east since April 2014.
Steinmeier said there had not been sufficient progress in implementing the February 2015 Minsk accords aimed at settling the conflict.
"We have to work for a deescalation of the situation," the German minister said.
Western officials were talking with Moscow and Kyiv to encourage them to implement measures already agreed in the Minsk process, including local elections in the separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine, Steinmeier also said.
Based on reporting by Reuters and TASS
From our news desk:
Reports from Ukraine say Aleksandr Shchetinin, a Kyiv-based Russian journalist who founded the Novy Region news agency, has been found dead at his apartment.
Ukrainian police said they suspect Shchetinin’s death was a suicide.
Authorities said friends who visited Shchetinin’s apartment on Konstantinovskaya Street in Kyiv early on August 28 in order to congratulate him on his birthday found him seated in a chair on his balcony with a gunshot wound to the head and a gun on the ground beside him.
Police said Shchetinin also had written an email to a journalist colleague in which he declared his intention to kill himself.
Based on reporting by TASS, Interfax, UNIAN, and 112 Ukraine
Opinon piece in Britain's Telegraph: Thanks to the EU's bungling, Russia will inevitably win in Ukraine
Barring any major developments, that ends the live blogging for today.