We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow morning, you can catch up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.
RFE/RL's Tony Wesolowsky and Olha Komarova have been reporting on the big hike in Ukrainian household electricity bills:
Ukraine Raises Electricity Rates For Households
Viktoria Sydorenko makes do with just one light bulb instead of five to light her apartment in the Ukrainian city of Odesa on the Black Sea.
"I used to use at least two for normal lighting," Sydorenko told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
She and millions of other Ukrainians are thinking twice these days about when to flick the switch and when not to.
That's because the country's electricity regulator has just hit them all with a 25 percent rate hike effective March. And it won't stop there. Another rate increase is due in September.
For more than 10 ten years, electricity rates for consumers hardly changed, and costs for power generation and distribution were passed on to industry, small businesses, and government agencies, Vasyl Kotko, the chairman of Ukraine's National Energy Regulatory Commission (NERC), explained to RFE/RL.
Echoing what experts have said in the past, Kotko said that high energy prices have made Ukrainian businesses uncompetitive, while low prices have given consumers little reason to save power.
When it comes to wasting energy, Ukraine is literally at the top of the global charts. The country's energy intensity -- the ratio of energy used relative to economic output -- is twice that of Russia and 10 times that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. According to the UN, there is no country in the world more energy intensive than Ukraine.
Read the entire article here
Acclaimed Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart has written a really nice travel piece on the atmosphere that prevails in Ukrainian capital right now. Here's a taster:
Being driven into Kiev, I can tell something is different from my usual jaunts to the former Soviet Union. My cabbie isn’t complaining about Tajiks being lazy, Chechens violent, Jews arrogant, or Georgian youths partying too loudly in this building’s courtyard—the usual racist babble. Although, according to the talk show on the taxi’s radio, there is a lot to complain about. The hryvnia, the local currency, is down 60 percent for the year and inflation is up by 50 percent, the result of the nightmarish Moscow-directed civil war in Donetsk and Luhansk to the east, a conflict that has hit a stalemate by the time of my visit. And, more impressive, almost every single billboard running into the city has been commandeered for the upcoming local elections. It would appear that half of Kiev’s population is running for mayor. There’s the Party of Simple Folks; the Dill Party, which promises “concrete results”; a cartoon rhinoceros who promises “reform”; and the party of the current president, Poroshenko, promising nothing less than “peace.” If I could vote, I’d probably cast it for the “free Wi-Fi” party.
Throughout my stay I will be told how many of the candidates are in the pockets of corrupt oligarchs (et tu, Dill Party?), but the cacophony of democracy is still impressive, louder and more urgent than anything you will find in the European Union, to which Ukraine desperately aspires to belong. After being in Kiev for 40 minutes, I feel oddly safe and free.
Read the entire article here
Our news desk has some info on casualties in the east:
Ukraine Says Three Soldiers Killed, Five Wounded In East
Ukraine says three of its servicemen have been killed and five wounded in the country’s east.
A military spokesman in the eastern region of Luhansk said three soldiers were killed and two wounded when their vehicle hit a mine on the highway between the villages of Novotoshkivske and Hirne on March 1.
A military spokesman in Kyiv said another three government troops were wounded in exchanges of fire over the past 24 hours near the front line separating separatist-held parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions from the rest of Ukraine.
Two Ukrainian troops were wounded as a result of firing in the government-held towns of Krasnohorivka and Maryinka, while another soldier was injured in a booby-trap blast near the village of Kamianka.
Fighting between government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 9,100 people since April 2014.
The Minsk peace agreement signed a year ago has helped reduce the violence, but skirmishes have continued.