Biden warns Kyiv on commitment to reform:
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has delivered a blunt message to Ukraine, saying the country needs to follow through with economic and political reform or risk undermining European backing for Russian sanctions.
Biden said in a speech in New York on September 21 that Ukraine's progress in enacting crucial judicial and economic reforms had been mixed.
He said that was undermining support among European Union members for the sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its annexation of the Crimea peninsula in 2014.
The Russia-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine also led to the Western sanctions.
"We know that if they give an excuse to the EU, there are at least five countries right now that want to say, 'We want out'" of sanctions against Moscow, Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations.
Biden met with Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, a day earlier, when he said conditions had been met for a third U.S. sovereign loan guarantee of up to $1 billion. (Reuters, AP)
This ends our live blogging for September 21. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Poroshenko lambasts Russia over conflict in east:
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has criticized Russia for being "the instigator and major participant" in the ongoing deadly conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Poroshenko told the UN General Assembly on September 21 that Russia was financing, sponsoring, and coordinating "terrorist groups which have committed countless crimes against my compatriots."
He added that "the terrorist component of the undeclared hybrid war that Russia wages against Ukraine is evident."
More than 9,600 people have been killed since separatist forces and Ukrainian government troops began fighting in April 2014.
Poroshenko also used his UN speech to criticize what he called the UN Security Council's "inefficiency" in resolving the war in Syria or reacting more forcefully to "Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea."
He said the council's limitations "undermines the mission" of the UN and "challenges its existence."
In Minsk, Ukrainian officials and Russia-backed separatist representatives agreed on September 21 to pull back troops and heavy weapons from several areas in eastern Ukraine in an effort to uphold a tenuous peace deal reached in the Belarusian capital in 2015. (AP, Interfax)