Ukraine, rebels trade blame for refugees’ death
KYIV/ BERLIN Ukraine accused pro-Russian rebels on Monday of hitting a refugee convoy of buses with rocket fire near the eastern city of Luhansk, killing people trapped in the burning vehicles, but the separatists denied responsibility.
Government forces kept up pressure on the separatists in fighting overnight into Monday, blockading or recapturing rebel-held positions after international talks failed to reach agreement on a ceasefire.
Ukrainian military spokesmen said rebel missile fire on the buses had caused an unknown number of casualties.
Kyiv’s military said “many people died, including women and children” when insurgents shot at residents escaping fierce fighting around the besieged separatist city of Lugansk with “Grad rocket launchers and mortar guns given by Russia.”
“One place where we cannot report positive results is in, first and foremost, establishing a ceasefire and (starting) a political process,” Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov said Monday.
“A powerful artillery strike hit a refugee convoy near the area of Khryashchuvatye and Novosvitlivka. The force of the blow on the convoy was so strong that people were burned alive in the vehicles – they weren’t able to get themselves out,” military spokesman Anatoly Proshin told Ukrainian news channel 112.ua. Nine Ukrainian troops were killed
in the overnight fighting.
A senior rebel leader denied his forces had the military capability to conduct such an attack, and accused the government of regularly attacking the area including with Russian-made Grad missiles.
“The Ukrainians themselves have bombed the road constantly with airplanes and Grads. It seems they’ve now killed more civilians like they’ve been doing for months now. We don’t have the ability to send Grads into that territory,” said Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
Lavrov said all issues around a humanitarian convoy sent by Moscow to relieve needy areas of eastern Ukraine had been resolved at international talks in Berlin. But he said no progress had been made in his talks with the Ukrainian, German and French foreign ministers on a ceasefire or a political solution. “We are not able to report on positive results on reaching a ceasefire and on the political process,” he told a news conference.
Russia says it would like a ceasefire to allow aid to get to people trapped by the fighting.
While calling for surrender by the rebels, Kyiv has been steadily tightening the squeeze in their two main strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk and cutting off their communication lines. The rebels have reshuffled their top leadership with at least two Russians leaving their posts to make room for Ukrainians.
The impression that the rebels are now on the back foot was strengthened by the Donetsk leadership’s announcement that it would bring in military tribunals with the right to pass the death sentence on those who committed serious offences such as espionage and sabotage.
The announcement, issued on the Donetsk’s rebels website, quoted leading rebel officials as saying that other serious violations including looting would also be dealt with harshly.
“Introducing the death penalty is not revenge, it is the highest degree of social protection,” a senior rebel leader, Vladimir Antyufeyev, was quoted as saying.
A military spokesman in Kyiv said government forces had pressed the separatists in overnight fighting, encircling the rebel-held town of Horlivka between Luhansk and Donetsk, and taking control of smaller settlements in eastern Ukraine.