Good morning. We'll get the live blog rolling today with a couple of news items that were posted overnight:

Kyiv Mayor Klitschko, President Zelenskiy Battle Over City Management Rights

KYIV -- Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko is heading for a legal collision course with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy over keeping his executive powers as the head of the city state administration, the national-level branch of Ukraine's government that administers the capital.

Zelenskiy’s office has asked the former championship boxer to step down and relinquish his powers, but stay on in the more symbolic role as mayor.

Presidential office head Andriy Bohdan said Klitschko must go at a July 30 briefing, accusing the mayor of enabling graft and of not controlling the Kyiv city council.

"He [Klitschko] has lost control of the situation in the city during last five years,” Bohdan said. "There are two or three 'watchmen'…And if he does not find a compromise with them, there will be no majority in the Kyiv city council and, accordingly, he cannot be an effective mayor."

Alleging that Klitschko turned a blind eye on corruption in the city's construction industry, Bohdan said that a person speaking on behalf of the mayor called him to offer a $20 million bribe to let the mayor stay on.

Klitschko denied the allegations.

In response, Klitschko on August 1 said he had asked the National Anticorruption Bureau to investigate Bohdan’s bribery allegation, according to a statement.

"If somebody said something in somebody's name for illicit gains…then detectives should either name the suspects and identify them, otherwise I’ll ask Bohdan for an apology for spreading false information," Klitschko said.

By law, Kyiv has special administrative status for self-governance. According to the Constitution, the president appoints and dismisses the Kyiv city administration head at the behest of the government.

Zelenskiy on July 24 asked the Cabinet of Ministers to dismiss Klitschko.

Klitschko later told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service that he "won’t give up."

However, a December 2003 Constitutional Court ruling said that the mayor has exclusive rights to select the city administration head.

Klitschko occupied the executive seat of Kyiv on June 25, 2014 after being elected mayor on June 4 of that year.

In an interview with RFE/RL earlier this month, Klitschko said that the actions of Zelenskiy’s staff "smell of authoritarianism."

"The influence of the president and government on local self-governance directly contradicts the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights," Klitschko said.

He also criticized Zelenskiy's Servant of the People party of trying to separate the powers of the mayor and city administration head.

The community, he said, "forms the budget, has challenges, it has land, property, and it chooses a manager who manages it and reports to the community."

Klitschko said that, if he loses his city management powers, he'll go to the courts, as well as to "the public, we'll take all the steps to prevent this."

Kyiv’s 2019 budget is the equivalent of $2.24 billion.

Dozens Of Activists Protest Ukrainian Anticorruption Activist's Unsolved Killing

Several dozen people on August 1 staged a protest outside the building of Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv over the lack of progress in the investigation into the death of a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist.

Kateryna Handzyuk, a 33-year-old civic activist and adviser to the mayor of the Black Sea port city of Kherson, died in November -- three months after she was severely injured in an acid attack on July 31 last year.

Activists lit flares and shouted "Who ordered the attack on Katya Handzyuk?"

The protest came after a decision last month by Ukraine's prosecutor-general to suspend an investigation into the role of a high-ranking regional official charged in Handzyuk's death.

Prosecutors in February arrested Vladyslav Manher, head of the regional council in the southern region of Kherson, and charged him with ordering the Handzyuk attack.

Manher was later released on bail. He has denied any involvement into the attack.

In a July 25 statement, the Prosecutor-General's Office announced that the probe into Manher and a second suspect, Oleksiy Levin, had been suspended because Levin's whereabouts remain unknown.

The statement said Manher and Levin's involvement in the case is interconnected, and cited this as the basis for suspending the legal provisions of Ukraine's Criminal Procedural Code.

The Human Rights Protection Group, a Ukrainian rights watchdog, has questioned the prosecutor-general's move, arguing that Manher's whereabouts are known.

In June, five men were sentenced to prison terms of between three and 6 and 1/2 years for organizing and executing the attack after they pleaded guilty and made deals with investigators.

Human rights activists have accused Ukrainian law enforcement agencies of failing to thoroughly investigate the growing number of attacks on activists, and even of collusion with the perpetrators in some cases.

With reporting by Gordon, Ukrayinska Pravda, and UNIAN

We are now closing the live blog for today, but we'll be back again tomorrow morning to follow all the latest developments. Until then, you can keep up with all our other Ukraine coverage here.

According to the report, this person also fought in eastern Ukraine, hoping to "infiltrate the ranks of Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatists to collect intelligence on Russia’s involvement in the eastern Ukrainian conflict."

Andriy Bohdan seems to have penned a resignation letter. (He's only been in the job a couple of months.)