Here's news of a landmark development, courtesy of RFE/RL's Brussels correspondent Rikard Jozwiak:
EU Formally Approves Ukraine Association Agreement
BRUSSELS -- The European Union's 28 member states on July 11 formally endorsed the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.
This is the final step in the ratification process, and the deal will enter into force on September 1 after years of political twists and turns surrounding the document.
The landmark deal was initially slated for signing in November 2013. But the Ukrainian president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, walked away from it under pressure from Moscow, prompting massive protests that pushed him from power in February 2014.
Russia responded by annexing Ukraine's Crimea region and providing military and economic support to separatists in a war against Kyiv that has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine.
Current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed the EU agreement in June 2014, but it remained unratified after 61 percent of Dutch voters opposed it in a citizen-driven, nonbinding referendum in April 2016.
The Dutch government eased voters' concerns in December the same year by negotiating a legally binding supplement to the Association Agreement with the other 27 EU member states to underscore that it will not give Kyiv the right to automatic EU membership or guarantee any EU military aid for Ukraine.
The Netherlands ratified the Association Agreement in June after both its lower house and Senate voted in favor of it earlier this year.
Lots of people happy about this:
Here's a new item from our news desk:
Russian Military Says Fighter Detained In Ukraine Was Discharged In 2016
The Russian military has denied that a Russian man who was detained by government forces in eastern Ukraine in June is an active-duty serviceman.
Footage in which Viktor Ageyev said he was serving in the Russian armed forces on a contractual basis when he was captured was broadcast in Ukraine on July 9.
In a statement released late on July 10, Russia's Southern Military District said that Ageyev was discharged from the military in spring 2016 and now "has nothing to do with the Russian Army."
Despite ample evidence, Russia denies accusations by Kyiv and the West that it is providing weapons, training, and personnel to support separatists fighting government forces in a conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
In Kyiv on July 10, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has called on Russia to remove what he said were thousands of its soldiers from Ukraine "and stop supporting the militants with command-and-control and military equipment."
The Russian denial that Ageyev was an active soldier at the time of his detention echoed developments following the capture of two other Russians, Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, in May 2015.
The two men initially acknowledged that they were Russian Army soldiers, but retracted those statements after Russia claimed that they were no longer serving.
Aleksandrov and Ageyev were both sentenced to 14 years in prison in May 2016, after being convicted of fighting alongside the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. They were later returned to Russia as part of an exchange for Ukrainian military aviator Nadia Savchenko.