Ukraine Affirms Ceasefire Plans As Casualties Mount In The East
Moscow (Alliance News) – Casualties in eastern Ukraine mounted on Friday as the government in Kyiv affirmed plans to enter another ceasefire with the pro-Russian separatists.
Six Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 13 injured in clashes over the past 24 hours, the National Security Council said in Kyiv. Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko said government forces had repelled attempts by the separatists to encircle the airport of Donetsk.
He stressed that both of the airport’s terminals remain under the military’s control.
The police in the separatist-controlled city said three civilians were killed by artillery fire, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
The fighting comes amid efforts to implement another ceasefire next Tuesday.
Valeriy Chaly, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, warned that the rebel-held territories faced a humanitarian catastrophe during the coming winter months.
“Without a ceasefire we might just lose our fellow citizens in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” Chaly said in Kyiv.
The leader of the separatists in Donetsk, Alexander Zakharchenko, told Interfax that he was ready to obey the truce.
Poroshenko announced Thursday that a “day of silence” would be declared on December 9.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday expressed hope that the new ceasefire will come about and that negotiations to define the dividing line between the two sides make progress.
“We expect that our Western partners … who have decisive influence on the Ukrainian leadership, will stimulate its implementation,” Lavrov said in Basel, Switzerland.
Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of supporting the separatists with heavy weapons and fighters, charges that Moscow denies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the West of wanting to destroy Russia, drawing parallels to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Putin also defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March, saying the Black Sea peninsula was as sacred to Russia as the Jerusalem holy site the Temple Mount is to Israel.
Germany on Friday rejected Putin’s claim as a “religious magnification.”
“That in no way justifies the breach of international law that Russia committed by the annexation of Crimea,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
He argued that the peninsula had been the home of various ethnic groups of different religions for centuries.
Seibert insisted that German policies on the Ukraine conflict are not anti-Russian but designed to call a breach of international law what it is and create incentives for a diplomatic solution.
Copyright dpa
