Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
An excerpt:
A few days later, in government-controlled Mariupol, a colleague and I listen to another man, a small-scale trader, tell about his experience in the MGB’s basement prison in Novoazovsk, a small town in DNR-controlled territory. He spent five and half months there in late 2015 early 2016, on suspicion of collaborating with the Security Service of Ukraine.
For three of those months his captors had him cuffed to a water pipe, so he could only sit, crouch, curl up on the floor, or crawl a short distance. His interrogators beat him, hung him up in an extremely painful position, tortured him with electric shocks, and starved him. It was the indignity of being chained “like an animal, a wild beast” for months that seems to have shaken him at least as much as the extreme physical suffering. “How can they do this?” he queries, “How can they do this to their fellow human? I want these people punished.”
During the two and a half years that Ukraine has been wracked by war, Human Rights Watch interviewed scores of victims of arbitrary detentions and torture by Russia-backed separatistsand repeatedly raised these issues with DNR and LNR de-facto authorities. So far, none of these victims has seen justice.
Moscow, Kyiv At Loggerheads Over Planned Crimea Missile Tests
Russia said it has had no response from Ukraine regarding its request that Kyiv cancel a planned missile test over the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
Russian Transportation Minister Maksim Sokolov told reporters in Moscow on November 29 that he had expressed concerns over Kyiv's plans to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
On November 24, Ukraine issued a formal notice to airmen on airspace danger zones in connection with the planned tests. Kyiv said the tests will be conducted in accordance with international regulations entirely in Ukraine's airspace over the open sea.
Kyiv plans to test air-to-air combat missile systems.
On November 25, Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) condemned Ukraine's plans, calling them "a violation of all international agreements and a unilateral decision to conduct missile firing in Russia's sovereign airspace."
Ukraine's secretary of national security and defense, Oleksandr Turchynov, then called Rosaviatsia's statement "hysteria," saying that Russia's sovereign airspace in the Black Sea ends in the middle of the Kerch Strait, where Kyiv does not plan to hold any tests.