A tweet on tomorrow's local election from the U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv:
Good morning. We'll start our live blog today with this Ukraine-related item from our news desk:
Flights between Ukraine and Russia will be banned starting this weekend despite a last-ditch effort by senior Russian officials to prevent the ban, Ukraine's infrastructure minister said on October 24.
"From October 25, there will not be air traffic with Russian cities," Minister Andrei Pivovarsky told Russian news agencies.
Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Brussels on October 23 as part of a Moscow-led effort to prevent the Kyiv-initiated ban on flights between the countries.
Russian Transportation Minister Maksim Sokolov told reporters that his country would continue to push for the bans to be removed, arguing that Ukraine should go along with this because 75 percent of air travelers between Russia and Ukraine are Ukrainian.
Ukraine announced late last month that it would ban flights from Russia starting on October 25. Russia quickly retaliated with a tit-for-tat ban that would go into effect on the same day.
Ukraine made the announcement despite several weeks of relative calm in the country's two eastern-most regions, which have been at the center of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists.
(dpa, TASS)
Barring any major developments, that ends the live blogging for today.