Here's another update from RFE/RL's news desk:
NATO has warned Moscow that any attempt by Russian-backed separatists to take more territory in eastern Ukraine would be "unacceptable."
NATO said in a statement on August 19 that its 28 member states had discussed the recent escalation in violence in Ukraine and added that "Russia has a special responsibility to find a political solution" to the crisis.
It called on all parties to "de-escalate tensions and exercise restraint."
NATO said any attempt by the rebels to move further into Ukraine would be "unacceptable to the international community."
Fighting between government forces and the separatist forces around the southern port city of Mariupol in recent days has led to several people being killed.
NATO also called on all sides to ensure that monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) can perform their jobs "safely and without restrictions."
More than 6,400 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since March 2014.
(Reuters, dpa)
RFE/RL's Halyna Tereshchuk and Robert Coalson have published a harrowing account of a Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Mashonkin's time as a separatist prisoner.
The first days of captivity were the worst, Mashonkin says, especially after the "cyborgs" spent a day under the control of the notorious separatist commander Arseny Pavlov, aka Motorola.
"They'd take a few of us away and beat them," Mashonkin tells RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. "Then they'd bring them back and take away someone else. This lasted all day. They beat everyone -- with pipes, stools, table legs. They beat us all over -- on the head, all over the body, in the groin."
"Eventually, the pain stopped -- they were beating us so badly that they were just breaking things that were already broken."
At one point, Mashonkin says, the men were even beaten by an Orthodox priest.
"When we were with Motorola, a priest appeared -- apparently from the Moscow Patriarchate -- with a cross. He beat us on the head with that cross. Maybe he thought it would drive out our sins," Mashonkin remembers. "He said that we were not human. A priest in a cassock with a cross. And when the wooden cross broke over someone's head, he came back with a metal one. I've seen priests like that only in horror films."
Read the entire article here