Alec Luhn sounds a wee bit skeptical...
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with a couple of things that caught our eye overnight:
And here's a tweet from the deputy head of Ukraine's investment promotion office:
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Saturday, February 11, 2017. Check back here tomorrow for more of our ongoing coverage.
Prominent Ukrainian Author Seized In Belarus, Ordered To Leave
By RFE/RL's Belarus Service
MINSK -- A popular Ukrainian writer says he was seized by Belarusian security agents in the middle of the night while visiting Minsk and ordered to leave the country.
Serhiy Zhadan said on February 11 that he was in Minsk to attend a poetry festival but was ordered to leave on the basis of a 2015 Russian entry ban that accused him of "involvement in terrorism."
Zhadan said police and Belarusian KGB agents entered his hotel room while he was sleeping at about 2 a.m. on February 11 and took him into custody.
Zhadan, an acclaimed novelist and poet whose books have been widely translated, said nothing was explained to him initially by the authorities who detained him.
He said he was taken to a jail in Minsk, where he spent the rest of the night in a cell.
Zhadan took part in pro-European protests in Kyiv that led to the ouster of Ukraine's Moscow-backed president in 2014.
Here is today's map of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, according to the National Security and Defense Council:
