KIEV (Reuters) – Pro-Russian separatists renewed attacks on Ukrainian forces at an airport complex in the east yesterday after Kiev launched a mass operation to reclaim lost ground there that Russia called a “strategic mistake”.
Ukrainian officials said three soldiers had been killed and 66 wounded over the past 24 hours, during which they said they had returned battle lines at the airport outside Donetsk to the status quo under a much violated international peace plan.
Russia expressed concern at what it called escalation by Kiev and published its own peace plan yesterday in the form of a letter from President Vladimir Putin to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, which it said Poroshenko had rejected.
“It’s the biggest, even strategic mistake of the Ukrainian authorities to bank on a military solution to the crisis,” Interfax quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin as saying. “This may lead to irreversible consequences for Ukrainian statehood.”
In Kiev, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said Ukrainian intelligence had confirmed Russian cross-border arms deliveries to the separatists were continuing.
“Tanks, howitzers, Grad systems, Smerch, Buk,” Yatseniuk told a joint news conference with Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, listing Russian-made missile systems which he said were being channelled to the separatists.
“Radio-electronic surveillance stations are not on sale in the Donetsk market – they are only to be had from the Russian defence ministry and Russian military intelligence,” he said.
In Kharkiv, a big eastern city well away from the conflict zone, an explosive device went off near a court house, injuring at least 14 people in the latest of a series of mysterious explosions in the city, police said.
Markiyan Lubkivsky, an adviser for the state security service SBU, said on his Facebook page the incident was being treated as a “terrorist act”.
Ukrainian officials have insisted Moscow sticks to the 12-point peace plan agreed in Minsk in September, which they say was not violated by its airport counter-offensive, launched after troops had appeared to be pinned down inside the complex.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said the situation was still very tense around the airport, which has symbolic value for both sides, and separatists continued attacks on government forces there and elsewhere in the east.
Since plans for another round of peace talks last week were abandoned, fighting has flared up again in Ukraine, whose Crimean peninsula was annexed by Russia in March last year, prompting a crisis with the West, which has imposed sanctions.
The World Health Organisation says more than 4,800 people have been killed in the conflict.
