Women clean a garden around a house damaged by recent shelling in the village of Semyonovka near Slaviansk, eastern Ukraine, on Monday. Pro-Europe parties secured a big win in an election in Ukraine, a partial vote count showed on Monday.
AFP/Kiev
Heavy shelling erupted on Monday near the separatist held town of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, ending a calm period during weekend parliamentary elections.
Several dozen Grad multiple rockets could be heard firing early in the morning from the area of Putilovsky, a Donetsk neighbourhood near the city's ruined airport, AFP correspondents said.
A Ukrainian government-held base nearby in Avdiivka was hit by the heavy rockets, a local resident there said by telephone.
"The shelling began during the night. Everyone was expecting fighting to start right back up after Sunday's elections in Ukraine," said Marina, at a separatist checkpoint in Putilovsky. "It's fine, this is our side shooting. But now there will be the reply from the Ukrainians."
President Petro Poroshenko said that preliminary results from the legislative election showed backing for his plan to negotiate an end to the war with the separatists, who have declared their own "people's republics" allied with Russia.
Kiev accuses Russia of arming and organising the rebel militias, charges Moscow denies.
Pro-Western and nationalist parties were on course for a crushing election win, boosting Poroshenko’s bid to merge his country with Europe and make peace with pro-Russian rebels.
Early results and exit polls indicated overwhelming support for Poroshenko’s drive to break his war-torn country out of Russia’s orbit despite the painful economic measures the Kremlin has levied on its western neighbour in reprisal.
Many in Kiev and the West blame the six-month uprising in the east of the country, that has claimed 3,700 lives, on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to destabilise Ukraine’s new government and create a “frozen conflict” in its vital rustbelt.
But parties with links to Moscow or the old Viktor Yanukovych regime that was ousted after his abrupt rejection in February of a landmark EU pact were routed at the ballot boxes on Sunday.
“I want the war to end and for our country to join the European Union, although I doubt this will happen very soon,” pensioner Bogdan Golobutskiy said as he trudged up to a Kiev polling station on a chilly but sunny morning.
Radicals who rejected Poroshenko’s peace deal with the insurgents that offered them limited autonomy also had a poor showing—as did corruption-tainted politicians who had steered Ukraine through two decades of stuttering reforms.
Analysts said it was almost certain that Poroshenko will have to share power with Yatsenyuk as premier.
“Voters did not want a monopoly of power in one pair of hands,” said Vadym Karasyov of Kiev’s Institute of Global Strategies. “They voted for a Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk tandem.”
A buoyant Poroshenko said, in nationally televised comments, said “more than three quarters of voters who took part in the polls gave strong and irreversible backing to Ukraine’s path to Europe,”
The 49-year-old chocolate baron said a majority also supported his search for “political methods” to end the war in the country’s industrial east.
