Kyiv says 4 of its troops killed in eastern Ukraine
Ampliar
Ethnic-Russian militiamen in eastern Ukraine escort an unidentified prisoner amid clashes with forces loyal to the government in Kyiv. EFE
Kramatorsk, Ukraine, May 5 (EFE).- The government in Kyiv said Monday that four of its troops were killed and 30 others wounded in clashes outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk, the main bastion of insurgents demanding regional autonomy.
The pro-autonomy side suffered as many as 20 casualties in the fighting, a spokesman for the mainly ethnic-Russian militias told Russia’s Interfax news agency.
Federalist rebels managed “to stop the advance of the enemy in the environs of the city, but with great difficulty,” the spokesman said.
Russian television reported numerous militia and civilian casualties in Semionovka, a village on the outskirts of Sloviansk, the center of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of the Donetsk region.
Kyiv’s military operation to retake the city is proceeding slowly because of a desire to minimize civilian casualties, the provisional government’s interior minister told reporters at a checkpoint near Sloviansk.
“Our forces are not assaulting inhabited neighborhoods,” Arsen Avakov said.
Sloviansk is being defended by at least 1,000 fighters, including veterans of the Ukrainian, Russian and Soviet armies, Avakov’s ministry says.
Long-simmering tensions between pro-European western Ukraine and the country’s eastern region, which has close ties with Russia, were exacerbated by the ouster in late February of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian-speaker from the East.
The crisis that led to Yanukovych’s ouster erupted at the end of November, when Yanukovych backed away from plans to ink a pact with the European Union and instead signed a $15 billion financial-aid package with Russia.
Brussels’ offer of closer ties with EU was conditioned on a pledge by Ukraine not to enter into any additional economic accords with Russia, Kyiv’s leading trade partner and energy supplier.