Report says North Korea makes own rocket engines, doesn't need Ukraine technology:
The Reuters news agency is quoting U.S. intelligence officials as saying they believe North Korea can produce its own missile engines and does not need to import the technology from Ukraine.
The Reuters report on August 15 provides backing to Ukraine, which has denied supplying North Korea with any missile technology, and runs counter to a new study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies which said that Pyongyang probably obtained the engines used in its latest ballistic-missile tests on the black market from factories in Ukraine or Russia.
Reuters quoted one U.S. intelligence official as saying: "We have intelligence to suggest that North Korea is not reliant on imports of engines.... Instead, we judge they have the ability to produce the engines themselves."
An August 14 report in The New York Times, citing an analysis by a missile expert and classified assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, said that "North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines probably from a Ukrainian factory."
When asked about the matter on August 15, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that Ukraine has a "very strong nonproliferation record." (Reuters, TASS)
CPJ denounces Russian journalist's deportation:
By RFE/RL
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Ukrainian authorities to remove "all restrictions" on Russian journalist Tamara Nersesian's ability to report from Ukraine, after she was deported from the country.
"We call on Ukraine to allow Tamara [Nersesian] and all journalists to report freely from the country, regardless of their country of origin or the editorial line of their employers," CPJ Europe and Central Asia program coordinator Nina Ognianova said in a statement on August 15.
"Banning Russian media from Ukraine is neither democratic nor conducive to resolving the crisis between the two countries," Ognianova added.
Earlier, Olena Hitlyanska, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), wrote on Facebook that "Russian propagandist" Nersesian had been deported overnight over national security concerns and barred from entering Ukraine for three years.
Nersesian is a correspondent for the Russian state broadcaster VGTRK.
She told the Russian media holding RBC that security officials had detained her in Kyiv, brought her to the SBU headquarters, and questioned her for three hours.
Nersesian also said that she was told she was being expelled from Ukraine and banned from the country because of her reporting, which officials told her inflamed the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Kyiv has banned more than a dozen Russian television channels since 2014, accusing them of spreading war propaganda.
Russian-Ukrainian relations soured after street protests in Kyiv toppled Ukraine's then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally, in February 2014.
Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and threw its support behind separatists in the country's east in a conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people since 2014. (w/RIA Novosti, UNIAN, RBC)
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.