Ukraine crisis: 5 NATO members to send weapons to Ukrainian forces
A senior aide to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said on Sunday Kyiv had reached agreement during the NATO summit in Wales on the provision of weapons and military advisers from five member states of the alliance.
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“At the NATO summit agreements were reached on the provision of military advisers and supplies of modern armaments from the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Norway,” the aide, Yuri Lytsenko, said on his Facebook page.
He gave no further details and it was not immediately possible to confirm his statement. Poroshenko, whose armed forces are battling pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, attended the two-day summit in Wales that ended on Friday.
NATO officials have said the alliance will not send weapons to Ukraine, which is not a member state, but they have also said individual allies may choose to do so.
Russia is fiercely opposed to closer ties between Ukraine and the NATO alliance.
Renewed fighting threatens ceasefire
One civilian was killed in shelling in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and large explosions were heard near the airport in Donetsk early Sunday, raising fears that a ceasefire signed two days ago is on the verge of collapse.
Blasts from the area near the airport were powerful enough to be heard in downtown Donetsk, the main rebel-held city in eastern Ukraine.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s national security council, Volodymyr Polyovyi, said at a briefing in Kyiv that rebels appeared to have tried to attack the airport, which has been under the control of government troops since May and has come under unremitting attacks from pro-Russia separatist rebels since then.
A local woman puts out the fire at her burning house after shelling in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, Sept. 7, 2014. (Sergei Grits/Associated Press)
The ceasefire had appeared to be holding for much of the day on Saturday, but shelling started late at night. A rebel statement said Ukrainian forces violated the ceasefire by firing on their positions in six locations on Saturday, including near the Donetsk airport. The statement said several rebels were killed.
Shelling also occurred overnight on the outskirts of the port city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian troops retain defensive lines against the rebels
The city council there said one civilian was killed and a serviceman was wounded. A shell also destroyed a nearby gas station and the volunteer Azov Battalion said on Facebook that their positions were hit by Grad rockets, but did not give details.
Mariupol is located on the coast of the Sea of Azov, 115 kilometres south of Donetsk. Rebels recently opened a new front on the coast, leading to fears that they were trying to secure a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in March.
At least 2,600 killed in fighting
Ukraine, Russia and the Kremlin-backed separatists signed the ceasefire deal in the Belarusian capita, Minsk, on Friday in an effort to end more than four months of bloodshed. The negotiators also agreed on the withdrawal of all heavy weaponry, the release of all prisoners and the delivery of humanitarian aid to devastated cities in eastern Ukraine.
A woman reacts after seeing the damages done to her house after returning home in Yasinuvata, on the outskirts of Donetsk, after a tepid ceasefire took effect this weekend. (Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images)
Western leaders voiced skepticism over Russia’s commitment to the deal. A previous 10-day ceasefire, which each side repeatedly accused the other of violating, yielded few results at the negotiating table.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s office on Saturday said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed steps “for giving the ceasefire a stable character” in a telephone conversation.
But, it said, both leaders assessed the ceasefire as having been “fulfilled as a whole.”
Fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian government troops has ravaged the already teetering Ukrainian economy, claimed at least 2,600 civilian lives and left hundreds of thousands homeless, according to United Nations estimates.
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