Korban transferred to house arrest:
A Ukrainian court has ordered house arrest for UKROP party leader Hennadiy Korban until December 31.
Kyiv's Pechera district court issued the ruling on November 6.
Korban's lawyer, Oksana Tomchuk, said the court's decision would be "most likely" appealed.
Korban, 45, was initially detained on October 31 on suspicion of involvement in organized crime, embezzlement, and kidnapping, and released 72 hours later as prosecutors failed to issue an arrest warrant against him.
Korban was detained again on November 3 after investigators obtained some more "evidence" of his alleged "involvement into a number of crimes."
UKROP activists say Korban, a former deputy governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, is being harassed for political reasons.
Korban's party, the Ukrainian Union of Patriots (UKROP), was officially registered in September 2014. (UNIAN, Interfax)
Washington offers Kyiv another $1 billion linked to reforms:
The White House has offered to provide a third $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine that would be contingent on the country's continued progress toward eliminating corruption and reforming taxes.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on November 5, said the United States was ready to help Ukraine, but Kyiv must first enact economic reforms
The U.S. financing and a $1.7 billion loan disbursement from the International Monetary Fund have been held up by squabbling between the Ukrainian parliament and Finance Ministry over proposed tax cuts.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on November 4 that the near-deadlock over the level of planned tax cuts threatened to derail the government's 2016 budget and Western financing that is linked to it.
Lawmakers want steep cuts that the Finance Ministry says are not sustainable.
"We now have many allies in the West and these allies will stand with us so long as we show political will, responsibility and the unchanging nature of our goals and values as we carry out reform," he said. "We must all speak in one language." (w/ Reuters)
Yatsenyuk, Baltic leaders blast Russian-German pipeline plan:
Ukrainian and the Baltic leaders have blasted a planned second Nordic Stream pipeline to funnel natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
The project would cost Ukraine $2 billion a year in lost revenues as it takes away business from the land-based pipeline that transits Ukraine and Poland, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said at a press conference with Baltic leaders in Riga on November 5.
Poland and Slovakia would also lose $300 million and $800 million, respectively, in annual pipeline revenues, while it would deprive the European Union of real energy independence, he said.
"We do believe that this project has nothing based on economic issues -- it is more a political one," he said.
Yatsenyuk, whose government has been fighting Russian-backed separatists since last year in eastern Ukraine, called on the EU to "seriously" examine the issue.
He warned against allowing Moscow to "facilitate a bottleneck and to control the energy market of the EU, too."
Latvian Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma said she was "highly concerned" about the project and called for a thorough EU review of the proposed seabed pipeline.
Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Roivas questioned whether the plan was in compliance with EU rules.
"It is quite clear that it would have a very significant negative impact on the gas supply of Ukraine," Roivas said.
Gazprom agreed in June with Western European partners Anglo-Dutch Shell, Germany's E.ON, and Austria's OMV to build the Nord Stream-2 pipeline to Germany to bypass conflict-torn Ukraine but also neighboring Poland.
The route under the Baltic Sea from Russia would have a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year and would double the flow of the existing Nord Stream pipeline currently linking the two countries.
No time frame was given for the deal.
For both Germany and Russia, the new pipeline would eliminate the uncertainty about winter gas supplies caused by a constant tug of war between Ukraine and Russia over gas issues, while it would boost Germany as a distribution hub for Russian gas in Western Europe. (AFP, dpa)