Ukraine Fighting Prompts US-Russia Meeting in Paris

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today after
pro-Russian rebels continued to clash with Ukraine troops in
several locations including the Donetsk airport.

The U.S. is concerned about renewed fighting and has no
details about the content of a Russian convoy that entered and
left Ukraine over the weekend, a State Department official said.
Russia still has about 25,000 troops along the border and more
than 3,000 soldiers inside the country, according to the
Ukrainian government. The U.S. and other NATO countries are
commencing military exercises in the country today.

Kerry will meet with Lavrov at a conference on Iraq that
will take place in Paris. While Russian President Vladimir Putin
has denied supporting pro-Russian rebels, Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that Putin seeks to restore the
Soviet Union and take the entire country.

The conflict has claimed more than 3,000 lives and clashes
have occurred daily since a truce took effect Sept. 5. Artillery
fire caused casualties among civilians in the city of Donetsk
yesterday, according to the city council. Attacks on Ukrainian
army positions occur in three to five spots per day, Defence
Minister Valeriy Geletey said.

The Donetsk airport was shelled from east and south on
Saturday in two rebel attacks that were repelled, and troops
were also shelled in the Luhansk region, a military spokesman
said.

Guns, Mortar

In addition, militants of the self-proclaimed Donetsk
People’s Republic were using guns and mortar to try to break
through Ukrainian troop lines near Panteleymonivka north of
Donetsk, the Ukrainian military said. Three Ukrainian border
soldiers were wounded near the southern city of Mariupol when
they were returning from patrol duty in a car, the Ukrainian
state border service said on Saturday.

The U.S. on Sept. 12 expanded sanctions against Russia to
Include OAO Sberbank, the country’s largest bank, because of the
fighting in eastern Ukraine. The European Union added 15
companies, including Gazprom Neft, OAO Rosneft (ROSN) and Transneft,
and 24 people to its own list of those affected by its
restrictions.

“Putin cannot cope with the idea that Ukraine will be part
of the European family,” Yatsenyuk said at a conference in Kyiv
Sept. 13. “He wants to restore the Soviet Union.”

Putin’s Goal

“His goal is to take the entire Ukraine,” Yatsenyuk told
the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting. “Russia is a threat
to the global order and to the security of the whole of
Europe.”

The second Russian convoy of 220 trucks entered and left
Ukraine over the weekend, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe said. All vehicles crossed into Ukraine
without being inspected by Ukrainian border guards, customs
officers or the International Committee of the Red Cross,
according to the OSCE. The OSCE cited Russian officials as
saying the convoy carried only food products.

The U.S. will participate in an annual training exercise in
Ukraine with 14 other nations that begins today, according to a
statement from Navy Captain Greg Hicks, a spokesman for U.S.
European Command.

The two-week field training exercise, which won’t include
any live fire, was planned before the outbreak of hostilities in
Ukraine, Hicks said. About 1,300 military personnel from the
U.S., Ukraine, Great Britain, Poland, Canada, Georgia and
Germany, among other countries, will take part in the exercise
to be conducted near Yavoriv, Hicks said.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Terry Atlas in Washington at
tatlas@bloomberg.net;
Volodymyr Verbyany in Kyiv at
vverbyany1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Balazs Penz at
bpenz@bloomberg.net
Hellmuth Tromm, James Kraus