This ends our live blogging for October 8. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Good morning. We'll start the live blog today with this report on another munitions blast in Ukraine, this time at a depot northeast of Kyiv:
Blast At Ukrainian Munitions Depot Prompts Evacuations
Nearly 10,000 people have been evacuated after a fire and a series of explosions hit an ammunition depot located some 180 kilometers east of Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities say.
There were no reports of casualties in the October 9 incident near the town of Ichnya in Chernihiv region.
The emergency services said in a statement that authorities temporarily closed the airspace in a 30-kilometer radius around the site, as well as rail and road traffic.
The fire and explosions began at around 3:30 a.m. local time at the Defense Ministry's depot No. 6, which is spread over about 700 hectares, a statement said.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman and the head of the country’s armed forces, Viktor Muzhenko, have traveled to the site.
'Restrictive Measures'
Muzhenko said that "appropriate restrictive measures" were being introduced across the Chernihiv region.
There have been a number of explosions and fires at the Ukrainian military’s arms depots in the past few years, amid continued fighting between government forces and Russia-backed separatists who hold parts of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in a conflict that has killed more than 10,300 people since April 2014.
Cease-fire deals signed in Belarus’s capital, Minsk, in September 2014 and February 2015, have failed to end the violence.
In March last year, a massive explosion and fire at a munitions depot near the central Ukrainian city of Kharkiv prompted the evacuation of about 20,000 residents living within a 20-kilometer radius of the site.
And in September 2017, more than 30,000 people were evacuated after artillery warehouses on a military installation exploded near the central city of Vinnytsia.
Authorities have blamed the blasts on "sabotage," and the government has allocated 100 million hryvnias ($3.6 million) for the protection of the country's ammunition storage facilities.
.