We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.
Good morning. It seems relatively quiet today, so we'll start the live blog with a few of the tweets that caught our eye overnight:
Peripheral but pertinent to Ukraine
As this years Oscars will be announced tonight, we've re-upped this feature we did on Winter On Fire, which has been nominated for best documentary feature.
Winter On Fire Blazes Oscar Trail With Gripping Account Of Ukraine's Maidan Moment
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.
While the gripping story of the Maidan unfolds before their eyes, viewers get to meet enthusiastic activists, wizened soldiers, distressed medics, local pop stars, and even a young Romany boy, who all spend months in atrocious weather facing down police bullets and batons as they fight for sweeping reform and a more westward orientation.
Read more here
TRAILER: Winter On Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
Here is today's map of the latest situation in the Donbas conflict zone, courtesy of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE):
