RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports that a state security officer who was Ukraine's counterintelligence chief in the final weeks of former President Viktor Yanukovych's rule has been arrested on suspicion of "high treason." The head of Ukraine's Security Service (SBU), Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, said in a televised interview overnight that Volodymyr Bik is suspected of helping "a foreign country to prepare saboteur activities in Ukraine."
Nalyvaychenko said Bik was arrested on November 8.
Nalyvaychenko said investigators are still searching for former SBU chief Oleksandr Yakymenko, who is wanted for alleged giving a command to shoot at the protesters.
There are dozens more ongoing high-treason probes targeting Yanukovych-era SBU officials.
Here's video from our Ukrainian Service of weekend fighting. Forces from the pro-government Kyiv 2 battalion came under fire from separatist positions near Volnovakha, 60 kilometers south of Donetsk, on November 8. They responded with rocket launchers, reporting that they had destroyed the separatist firing positions and suffered no casualties. The fighting came as shelling in Donetsk itself intensified.
President Vladimir Putin says the Kremlin will restrict the movement of money or take other "emergency measures" to stem the slide of the ruble.
Speaking to businesspeople ahead of the APEC summit in Beijing, President Vladimir Putin said Russia is taking "necessary steps" in response to the "serious fluctuation" of the ruble.
The ruble has lost 40 percent of its value this year due to concern over the Ukraine crisis, related Western sanctions, and falling prices for oil and gas whose export is crucial to the economy.
Putin said that Russia's "fundamentals in terms of currency reserves and balance of payments remain at good levels. That allows us to control the situation without taking any extraordinary emergency steps."
"We are not planning to impose any restrictions at all on capital flows."
Prosecutors in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv have opened a "terrorism" investigation into an explosion last night that injured 11 people at a pub frequented by soldiers and security forces returning from the conflict with pro-Russian rebels farther south, according to RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
The pub, called Stina (The Wall), is also a site of fund-raising and other forms of support for the military and refugees from the conflict zone.
Here's video of the aftermath that was circulating last night:
The pub's manager, Mykhaylo Ozerov, said he believes the blast was an attack meant as retaliation for those activities
Ukrainian authorities sometimes refer to rebels fighting against government forces in the conflict, which has killed more than 4,000 people since April, as terrorists.
Kyiv accuses Russia of sending troops and weapons into eastern UKraine to aid the rebels, who control large swaths of territory in he Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
There were earlier suggestions -- although none of them from official sources, apparently -- that the blast might have been a result of a gas leak. But one of those sources (cited in the report below) also cited a purported claim by "the bartender" that someone had left a suspicious package in the bar.
Pay no attention to the (armed) man behind the curtain (and next to it, and just inside the door, and next to the ballot box, and...)!