Death toll rises in Ukraine after peace talks fail


A pro-Russian fighter watches as a woman enters her house after it was damaged by shelling on Saturday in Makiivka, in the suburbs of Donetsk.


Reuters/AFP/DPA/Kyiv/Donetsk

Thirteen government soldiers and at least as many civilians have been killed in the past 24 hours in eastern Ukraine’s separatist conflict after the collapse of peace talks, Kyiv authorities said.
Hopes of easing the situation evaporated on Saturday with Ukraine’s representative and separatist envoys accusing the other of sabotaging negotiations.
“Fighting continues across all sections of the frontline,” Kyiv military spokesman Volodymyr Polyovy said in a briefing.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which took part in the talks in Minsk, Belarus, along with envoys from Ukraine and Russia, said that rebel delegates had not been ready to discuss key points of a peace plan.
“In fact, they were not even prepared to discuss implementation of a ceasefire and withdrawal of heavy weapons,” said the Serbian foreign ministry, which currently chairs the OSCE, in a statement.
It said rebels had instead pushed for a revision of a ceasefire plan agreed in Minsk last September.
The rebels say they now want to redraw the demarcation line between the two sides to include gains they have made since ripping up a shaky truce and pushing into Ukrainian territory.
Kyiv has rebuffed this demand and said that the rebels’ position has thrown any future peace talks into doubt.
“Unfortunately the peace process is now under threat,” Valeriy Chaly, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential administration wrote on his Facebook page.
The terms of that 12-point protocol have been repeatedly violated but Kyiv and foreign governments see it as the only viable roadmap to end the nine-month-long conflict in which more than 5,000 people have been killed.
In eastern Ukraine, the Kyiv military reported no let-up in rebel attacks on government positions.
Clashes are intense around the town of Debaltseve, Polyyovy said, referring to a Kyiv-held transport hub connecting the two main rebel strongholds that separatists aim to cut off.
“There is no question of encirclement or cutting off of the main communication lines. The situation is under control,” he said.
The rebel advance has succeeded in seizing part of nearby Vuhlehirsk from Kyiv troops, Polyovy said.
Yesterday the town was being pounded by near-constant shelling, a Reuters witness reported.
The interior ministry said yesterday that seven civilians had been killed in shelling on Debaltseve, while the Luhansk regional administration said three civilians had been killed in shelling across the region overnight.
Residents are being encouraged to abandon the areas of fiercest fighting, where many have been living in makeshift bomb shelters, waiting for breaks in the bombardment to make quick trips for food and water.
In Kyiv-controlled Sloviansk, refugees arrived in buses from Debaltseve and other frontline towns.
Pensioner Vyacheslav Gurov said half of his town of Avdiivka had been completely destroyed.
“We don’t even know who’s shooting. Both the rebels and the national guard are at it … there’s no water, no electricity, no heating, nothing,” he said.
In the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, the regional administration reported the deaths of at least three civilians in shelling yesterday, describing the situation as “extremely tense”.
A Reuters witness saw the body of a young man stretched out on a street in the city centre, killed when a shell struck a wall nearby.
Nadezhda Petrovna, 68, a neighbour, said the man was trying to run away from the attack when a shell landed in front of him.
“It is like this every day, people are getting killed, we are sleeping fully dressed so we can run into the cellar, this is becoming unbearable,” she said.
Following the collapse of Saturday’s talks, there was no word on when renewed negotiations might take place.
Western governments and Ukraine have accused Russia of sending regular troops and arms to bolster the rebels and spearhead the latest offensive – claims that Moscow has repeatedly denied.
The rebels, however, are equipped with the heavy weaponry of a regular army, hardware that they claim to have captured from fleeing Ukrainian forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked to each other by phone ahead of the peace meeting on Saturday, urging the warring factions to agree a truce in fighting that has left at least 5,100 people dead.
Moscow – suffering the economic impact of harsh Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis – reacted cautiously to the collapse of the talks, saying that they “needed time to evaluate them”.
The 28-nation EU on Thursday extended through September a first wave of targeted sanctions it had slapped on Moscow and Crimean leaders in the wake of Russia’s March seizure of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine.
US Secretary of State John Kerry is set to jet into Kyiv on Thursday to pledge Washington’s support for the war-torn nation during talks with President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk.
Yesterday Kyiv residents mounted a protest outside the Russian embassy to demonstrate what they perceive as Moscow’s role in the death of 31 people during a rocket attack in a residential area in Mariupol last month, the Tass news agency reported.
Moscow blames the Ukrainian government for the casualties.