Ukrainian police investigating Odesa blast:
Police in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa are investigating an explosion at a military aid center as a terrorist act.
Local authorities say the blast late on January 4 caused no injuries but shattered windows and damaged cars outside a building housing a volunteer center providing aid to Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
Interfax quoted a city police spokesman as saying assailants used an explosive device to destroy the entrance door to the one-story building.
The blast is the latest in a series to hit military support centers in Odesa.
It also comes one day after an explosion targeted freight cars carrying petroleum products at the Odesa-Peresyp railway station.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, which have prompted Kyiv to dispatch a National Guard unit to the city to participate in joint antiterrorism drills. (Interfax and AFP)
Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko's hunger strike in a Russian jail reaches its fourth week:
A hunger strike by Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko, who is being held in Russian custody, has entered its fourth week.
Savchenko's legal team says she has been ingesting only warm water for the past 21 days and that her health has begun to suffer.
Her lawyers have been barred from visiting Savchenko in detention through the end of state holidays on January 12.
Savchenko, who was captured by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in June, was transferred to Russian pretrial detention in July.
Russian authorities have charged the 33-year-old pilot with complicity in the killing of two Russian journalists covering the Ukraine conflict.
Savchenko denies the charges and says her transfer to Russia was illegal.
Savchenko's supporters on January 5 are carrying out a one-day Twitter campaign, using the hashtag #FreeSavchenko, to mark the 22nd day of her hunger strike.
An investigation by The New York Times into the final hours of Mr. Yanukovych’s rule — based on interviews with prominent players, including former commanders of the Berkut riot police and other security units, telephone records and other documents — shows that the president was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else.
"Normandy" group set to meet today in Berlin to discuss conflict:
A meeting of the so-called Normandy format group is due to take place in Berlin on January 5, where representatives of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany will discuss possibilities for a settlement in Ukraine.
Kyiv has said the director of the department of politics and communications, Oleksiy Makeyev, would attend and Russia said it was sending the director of the Foreign Ministry's second department for CIS affairs, Viktor Sorokin.
Makeyev was already in Berlin on January 4 and said all participants in the talks would present their plans for promoting the implementation of the Minsk accords.
The representatives hope to make enough progress so that a higher-level meeting of the Normandy format group can be held in the near future.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said at the end of December that he hoped a meeting of the Normandy format group could be held at the summit level in the Kazakh capital, Astana, in mid-January. (TASS and Interfax)