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18 Ukrainian servicemen have returned home after undergoing medical treatment at hospitals in the Russian southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Zvarych told Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday, July 24.

The Communist Party of Ukraine will cease to exist on Thursday, the speaker of Ukraine's parliament announced. "We only have to tolerate this party for another day," Verkhovnaya Rada speaker Oleksandr Turchinov said on Wednesday in comments carried by online news portal Ostro.org. Discussion of the Communist Party's dissolution began in earnest in May, after party leader Petro Simonenko said that if he were in charge of the country, he would immediately call back the troops from eastern Ukraine, referring to the military operations taking place there as acts of "war against the people," RIA Novosti reported. Turchinov, who was...

United Nations: The UN Security Council will hold an emergency meeting today morning on Ukraine. Britain's UN Mission said yesterday it requested the meeting and later tweeted that it is set for 10 am today. The request follows Wednesday's downing of a Ukrainian air force fighter and yesterday's downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane carrying 295 people over eastern Ukraine. Britain has proposed a Security Council press statement calling for "a full, thorough and independent international investigation into the incident." The statement, obtained by The Associated Press, was circulated to all 15 council members, who must approve it before...

A team of Pentagon officials is heading to Ukraine to help the country rebuild its fractured military, a mission that lawmakers and analysts expect will result in recommendations for greater military assistance in the country’s fight against pro-Russia separatists amid international outrage over the downing of a commercial airplane. Within the next few weeks, a group of Defense Department representatives who specialize in strategy and policy will head to Kiev to evaluate specific programs that the United States may want to help bolster, said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman. Their objective is to work with Ukrainians to “shape...

A Russian television channel said on Wednesday it had lost contact with a British journalist reporting from conflict-torn eastern Ukraine. RT said on its website it had been unable to reach Graham Phillips since the early hours of Wednesday after he went to cover intense fighting around Donetsk airport. The channel said it received a text message from Phillips saying "All is fine" at around 2:00am, after which contact was lost. RT's editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, posted a link to the story on her Twitter account, saying "our stringer Graham Phillips has gone missing in Ukraine." RT said it had warned...

The Red Cross has made a confidential legal assessment that Ukraine is officially in a war, Western diplomats and officials say, opening the door to possible war crimes prosecutions, including over the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH-17. "Clearly it's an international conflict and therefore this is most probably a war crime," one Western diplomat in Geneva told Reuters. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions setting down the rules of war, and as such is considered a reference in the United Nations deciding when violence has evolved into an armed conflict. "Within...

The Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine agreed on Monday to declare a ceasefire in clashes with pro-Kiev forces in the radius of 40 kilometers (25 miles) around the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, according to a leader of the self-proclaimed state. “This should help to ensure safe work of experts [at the crash site],” Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic Alexander Boroday said during a news briefing. Boroday said a large group of international flight safety experts, including officials from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is expected to arrive in Donetsk soon. It was...

Russia’s Defence Ministry dismissed accusations on Monday that pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine’s east were at fault for shooting down a Malaysia Airlines jet last week, alleging instead that Ukrainian warplanes had been flying close to the plane. The ministry also denied accusations that Russia had supplied the separatists with SA-11 Buk anti-aircraft missile systems – which are known as “Gadfly” in NATO – or “any other weapons.” “Russian air space control systems detected a Ukrainian Air Force plane, presumably an SU-25 (fighter jet), scrambling in the direction of the Malaysian Boeing,” Lieutenant-General Igor Makushev of Russia’s Air Forces told a...