Fresh fighting in Donetsk piles pressure on nine-day-old truce
DONETSK
Heavy fighting erupted around the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, piling further pressure on a precarious nine-day-old truce between the government and separatist fighters.
Large clouds of thick black smoke billowed over the industrial city as the boom of sustained shelling and the rattle of automatic gunfire rang out, AFP reporters witnessed.
Kyiv accused the rebels of jeopardising the truce by intensifying attacks on government positions in eastern Ukraine, the scene of five months of deadly combat.
Sunday’s fighting appeared to be concentrated near Donetsk airport where the Ukrainian military said it had driven back a major assault by insurgent fighters on Friday.
“The terrorist actions are threatening the realisation of the Ukrainian president’s peace plan,” said National Security and Defence Council spokesman Volodymyr Polyovy.
He also took aim at comments by two rebel leaders who both signed the 12-point truce deal in Minsk on September 5, but who declared on Sunday they were mere “observers” at the talks.
Rebels and government forces have since swapped dozens of captives under the accord, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has pledged to offer the eastern regions that form the economic backbone of Ukraine some limited self-rule.
But the insurgents on Sunday accused Kyiv’s forces of firing at them. “From our side, nobody is shooting but they are breaking the rules, everybody in the world knows it,” said a rebel commander defending a checkpoint near the village of Olenivka south of Donetsk.
Poroshenko heads to Washington this week to meet President Barack Obama, seeking to secure a “special status” alliance with the US as he steers Ukraine further out of Russia’s orbit.
Obama has rejected direct military involvement but instead unveiled increasingly painful economic sanctions on Moscow that – together with similar EU measures – effectively lock Russia out of western capital markets and hamstring its crucial oil industry.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Washington of “trying to use the crisis in Ukraine to break economic ties between the EU and Russia and force Europe to buy US gas at much higher prices”.
“I don’t know how, but somehow things will return to normal, it can’t be bad all the time,” said one resident Yulia as she carried a yellow plastic bag packed with basic supplies.
On the domestic front, cracks emerged in Poroshenko’s administration when a deputy foreign minister quit over a delay in the implementation of an EU trade deal, apparently under Russian pressure.
The deal – part of a broader association agreement to be ratified on Tuesday – was meant to revive Ukraine’s economy by lifting EU trade barriers, but Russia said it feared it would see its own market flooded with cheaper EU goods.
