Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with this sanctions update from RFE/RL's news desk:
European Union leaders are expected to discuss tense relations with Russia during a summit starting today in Brussels.
No new sanctions are expected to be decided at the two-day summit, as the EU "is not in a hardening mindset," one diplomat told AFP news agency.
Another said, "We don't want to provoke Putin too much."
The EU and United States have imposed sanctions on Russia in response to Moscow's actions in Ukraine, where pro-government forces have been battling pro-Russian separatists since April.
EU leaders will also discuss a 315 billion euro ($392 billion) investment plan aimed at helping revive growth in the EU.
The summit will be the first one led by the newly appointed European Council president, former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
(AFP, euractiv.com, and the BBC)
We are now closing our live blog for today. You can keep up with all our ongoing Ukraine coverage here.
Krassimir Yankov from Amnesty International has written a blog for the "Kyiv Post" about a recent visit to the Luhansk region. It does not make for pleasant reading:
As we drive out of Luhansk, a street market along Budyonnoho Boulevard captures my attention. It appears unusually large for a city under siege. Dozens of people are lined up in the mud and melting ice, presenting their goods on sheets of paper and plastic. Passers-by shoot awkward glances at the showcased wares: watches, clothes, pickled vegetables, old audio and video tapes. Suddenly it becomes clear that this is a flea market, in which everyone brought out everything that they could spare from their homes with the hope to score some extra income. But we continue to drive to a nearby village.
Novosvitlovka is only some 20 minutes away from Luhansk by car, but it looks like another planet. The moon-like landscape is dotted with craters, scorched tanks can be seen on almost every street, and very few houses have escaped the shelling. The church at the entrance of the village has also been damaged. In the small courtyard two men are concentrating on welding together what looks like a support frame for the dome of the church.
Next to them is Iryna Tchernyakova, 60, a local volunteer who dons a thick black coat to shield her from the frosty wind. “I’m ordering these clothes here, which are donated by people in the village for those who have lost their homes. There’s nothing else for me to do at the moment,” she tells me.
Further down the road, at the burned-out carcass of Novosvitlovka’s former House of Culture, two more women report they hadn’t received their pension for the last five months. “No one informed us of anything, no one tried to contact us,” they said. “We are starving,” one of them added, a desperate look in her eyes.
Read the entire article here