Top U.S., Russia officials meet to discuss Minsk deal near Kaliningrad:
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov have met to discuss the Ukraine crisis near Russia's western exclave of Kaliningrad.
A Russian Foreign Ministry representative said the meeting was held behind closed doors on January 15 at a state residence in the town of Pionersky, outside Kaliningrad, which borders EU members Lithuania and Poland.
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Nuland and Surkov met to discuss "the need for the full implementation of the Minsk agreements," a package of measures signed in February 2015 to resolve the war between Kyiv's forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
"Assistant Secretary Nuland's meeting with presidential adviser Surkov is part of our continued efforts to work with Russia to ensure full implementation of the Minsk agreements, in close coordination with the other Normandy powers -- Ukraine, Germany, and France," Kirby said in a January 15 statement.
AFP quoted an unidentified source familiar with the matter as saying that the meeting was held on Russian territory because Surkov was slapped with Western sanctions in response to the Kremlin's interference in Ukraine. (AFP, TASS)
This ends our live blogging for January 15. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with an interview we did with director Evgeny Afineevsky, whose documentary Winter On Fire: Ukraine's Fight For Freedom was nominated for an Oscar this week.
When a friend in Kyiv called Israeli-American filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky in November 2013 and convinced him to drop everything and take his cameras to Ukraine because "something was happening" there, he had no idea what he was getting himself into, let alone that it would lead to an Oscar nomination.
"Sometimes you need to be crazy, and I think we filmmakers are crazy," he told RFE/RL shortly before the resulting movie, Winter On Fire, was short-listed for an Academy Award for best documentary on January 13. "I came initially for two weeks, and that's how long we planned to be there. But literally after eight, nine days things changed."
Angered at President Viktor Yanukovych's abrupt rejection of stronger ties to the European Union in favor of Russia, tens of thousands of Ukrainians had gathered to vent their frustration on the capital's Maidan square, the site of the Orange Revolution nine years previously.
What started as a peaceful movement quickly spiraled out of control as the authorities became increasingly brutal in their attempts to suppress the unrest and, in turn, antigovernment activists attacked police lines and occupied public buildings. Some three months later Yanukovych had fled into Russian exile, and scores of demonstrators had died in the process.
And Afineevsky was there to film it all, capturing the stories of people from all walks of life who took to the streets to steer Ukraine away from Russian influence.
Read the entire interview here