Ukraine Troops Brace for More Attacks, as Fighting Continues
A shell hole mars a bus station of Lugansk, eastern Ukraine Saturday. Panicked refugees flooded highways and packed trains heading out of the main remaining rebel strongholds in eastern Ukraine Saturday, fearing an attack by government forces who lost dozens of servicemen to defiant militants.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
MOSCOW—Ukrainian government troops were on high alert Saturday, anticipating further attacks, after one of the bloodiest days of conflict since last month’s cease-fire, with neither Kyiv nor pro-Russia separatists showed signs of backing down.
Fighting continued near the eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, epicenters of Kyiv’s antiterrorist operation, causing five deaths and 27 injuries among government troops, Russian news agency Interfax cited Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council as saying at a news briefing in Kyiv.
Government forces were fired upon in several villages, forcing them to open artillery fire and begin patrolling airspace with fighter planes, said Ukraine’s border police. The continued violence prompted Kyiv to put its air defense forces on highest alert Saturday, a spokesman for Ukraine’s antiterrorist operation,
Vladislav Selyeznyov,
said on his official Facebook page.
Kyiv is slowly but steadily continuing efforts to reign in militants in eastern Ukraine despite a setback on Friday, when 23 soldiers and border guards were killed, many from a rocket attack. But the militants, too, were standing their ground in the areas surrounding Donetsk and Luhansk, firing Russian Grad rockets from a truck-mounted, multiple-missile launcher. Grad translates to “hail” in Russian.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that the situation remained especially tense in several towns and cities in the east. It added that it expects rebels to use local people as human shields and that many militants were planning to enter neighboring Russia.
Interfax reported Ukraine’s defense council as saying there had been 17 attacks on government checkpoints by militants during the day.
A separate incident early on Saturday at Ukraine’s border with Russia sparked some tension between the two countries. Moscow’s foreign ministry said shots were fired from both sides of the border in the direction of a Russian checkpoint. There were no casualties, but a vehicle was damaged. The ministry termed the incident a provocation and promised to “reserve its right to take all the measures provisioned in the Russian legislation to protect its territory and ensure the safety of its citizens” should Russia be provoked in this fashion again.
Meantime, the foreign ministry in Kyiv challenged that description of the incident, saying a Ukrainian checkpoint was fired upon from the Russian side of the border. The ministry called the incident a provocation by the Kremlin and asked the Russians to stop supporting militants in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Donetsk’s mayor,
Alexander Lukyanchenko,
has held meetings with Ukraine President
Petro Poroshenko
and his cabinet since Friday to discuss measures to help local residents and to avoid the use of heavy artillery and airstrikes on the city.
Write to Olga Razumovskaya at olga.razumovskaya@wsj.com