From our news desk:
Ukraine To Deport 'Kidnapped' Russian State TV Journalist
Ukrainian authorities say they have expelled a Russian state TV journalist, despite condemnation from Russia and a pan-European security organization.
In a Facebook post late on August 30, Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) spokeswoman Olena Hitlyanska said Russian First Channel correspondent Anna Kurbatova had been sent back to Russia and banned from entering Ukraine for three years.
"Russian propagandist Anna Kurbatova, whose forcible expulsion has been decided, has crossed the Ukrainian-Russian border," Hitlanskaya said. "She has been banned from entering our state for three years."
When contacted by the media earlier,Gitlyanska had declined to answer questions about whether and how Kurbatova had been detained.
The same thing will happen to "anyone who allows themselves to discredit Ukraine," she wrote on Facebook.
The expulsion comes after First Channel said Kurbatova had been detained by the SBU in Kyiv and that her whereabouts were unknown.
First Channel said Kurbatova had previously received threats from people who did not like her reports.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the move was a "deliberate provocation" by Ukraine's security service and nationalist radicals.
Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, wrote on social media that the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) and its member states should condemn Ukraine's behavior.
The move was condemned by an official from the OSCE, which monitors the conflict in eastern Ukraine and counts both Ukraine and Russia as members.
"I call on #Ukraine not to arrest & deport journalists from other OSCE States #AnnaKurbatova," Harlem Desir, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, wrote on Twitter.
The chairman of the Russian Journalists' Union, Vsevolod Bogdanov, said earlier that his organization would urge the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and other international organizations to help find Kurbatova, whom some Russian media reports described as having been kidnapped by the SBU.
Kyiv has banned more than a dozen Russian television channels since 2014, accusing them of spreading war propaganda.
On August 29, the SBU said it had barred two Spanish journalists over their coverage of the war eastern Ukraine -- a move media groups decried as an attack on free speech.
Russian-Ukrainian relations soured badly after protesters angry over the Ukrainian government's abandonment of a landmark deal with the European Union pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014.
Russia seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, after sending in troops, and backed separatists whose war against Kyiv's forces has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.