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Fierce battle between military and rebels in eastern Ukraine halts plane …

KYIV, Ukraine —A pitched battle between government troops and rebels around the key city of Donetsk grew so intense Sunday that international investigators called off a visit to the site of a downed Malaysian airliner, saying it was not safe.

About 30 investigators, led by the Dutch, arrived in Donetsk Sunday morning, shortly after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s office announced an agreement with Ukrainian rebels to allow an international police force to secure the site and protect the crash investigators. But their intended visit was called off due to security concerns, and the investigators remained inside a Donetsk hotel while heavily-armed pro-Russia insurgents reportedly milled around outside.

The Ukrainian military is making gains in an attempt to completely encircle the rebel stronghold in Donetsk and strangle any  remaining supply routes. 

As the fighting intensifies, and government forces vow to advance on Donetsk soon, residents are scrambling to get out of town. Roads leaving the city were jammed on Sunday. Frightened passengers waiting to board a train to Crimea Saturday night fled into the underground passageways as the sound of explosives grew nearer.

Government troops plan to advance next into Horlivka, a city that has been at the heart of the pro-Russian insurgency.

If the army succeeds in retaking Horlivka, a city of almost 300,000 people where fighting was fierce Saturday, they will be within a few miles of Donetsk. Rebels in Donetsk have held sway there since the spring, ruling what they call the Donetsk People’s Republic. Cars created roadblocks out of town Saturday, and the railway station was packed with people desperate to board the next train out.

The military already has ousted rebels from 10 surrounding villages and towns over the past week and blocked roads into and out of Donetsk to prevent supplies from entering the city, according to Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council.

“The next one will be Donetsk,” Lysenko said, making a bold prediction: “The city will be liberated.”

Ukrainian officials have sounded increasingly confident in recent days, even though 15,000 Russian troops are believed to be massed at the border and gaining in men and materiel with every passing day. American and Ukrainian officials have said Moscow appears to be stepping up its support of the rebels, which include many Russian citizens, since a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane was downed on July 17 by a missile fired from separatist-held territory.

Explosions from the battlefield could be heard Saturday at the unsecured crash site, where investigators say they are still finding human remains. A plane carrying the last of 227 coffins filled with body bags of passenger and crew from the crash left Kharkiv for the Netherlands on Saturday, though it’s not known how many remains are in each bag. That potentially leaves dozens of people unaccounted for.

Rebels said that they have given Dutch officials luggage and other personal effects belonging to crash victims, according to a statement cited by Russian news service Interfax.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said his country was not fighting a civil war in the east but “foreign mercenaries.”

“This is a real fight for the sovereignty of Ukraine, the territorial integrity of Ukraine, for the independence of Ukraine,” he said Saturday while awarding service medals to the National Guard. “It is not an internal conflict; it is Ukraine defending its territory from foreign mercenaries, from bandits and from terrorists.”

Russia, in turn, stepped up its rhetoric against the United States and Europe, accusing the United States of spreading lies and warning that sanctions imposed by the European Union are “endangering international security cooperation.”

A Foreign Ministry statement said the sanctions show Europe has “embarked on a complete turning away from cooperation with Russia on international and regional security, including the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, organized crime and other new challenges and threats.”

“We are convinced that such decisions will be enthusiastically received by international terrorists,” the statement added.

In a separate statement, the ministry accused the U.S. government of conducting “an unrelenting campaign of slander against Russia, ever more relying on open lies.”

The escalating tensions, within Ukraine and with its neighbor, have left many UkrainNEWS.GNOM.ES on edge.

The mayor of Kremenchuk, a town in central Ukraine, was fatally shot Saturday. The house of another mayor, in Lviv in western Ukraine, was damaged by fire from an antitank grenade launcher. That led many people to speculate on social media that the attacks were connected to the insurgency, though there was no evidence immediately available to prove that.

Karoun Demirjian reported from St. Petersburg. Alex Ryabchyn in Kyiv and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.