Pro-Russian separatists block a column of Ukrainian troops on armoured personnel carriers in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.
Reuters/Kramatorsk/Slaviansk, Ukraine
Separatists flew the Russian flag on armoured vehicles taken from the Ukrainian army yesterday, humiliating a Kiev government operation to recapture eastern towns controlled by pro-Moscow partisans.
Six armoured personnel carriers were driven into the rebel-held town of Slaviansk to waves and shouts of "Russia! Russia!"
It was not immediately clear whether they had been captured by rebels or handed over to them by Ukrainian deserters.
Another 15 armoured troop carriers full of paratroops were surrounded and halted by a pro-Russian crowd at a town near an airbase. They were allowed to retreat only after the soldiers had handed over the firing pins from their rifles to a rebel commander.
The military setback leaves Kiev looking weak on the eve of a peace conference today, when its foreign minister will meet his Russian, US and European Union counterparts in Geneva.
Moscow has responded to the overthrow of Moscow-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February by declaring the interim Kiev government an illegitimate gang of fascists.
It has also announced its right to intervene militarily across the former Soviet Union to protect Russian speakers, a new doctrine that has overturned decades of post-Cold War diplomacy.
The EU took a step towards imposing tougher economic sanctions on Russia by informing its member states of the likely impact of proposed measures on each of them.
Countries have a week to respond before the European Commission starts drawing up plans for sanctions on energy, finance and trade.
To keep the sensitive material from leaking, each of the 28 member states was told only of the expected risks its own economy would face. The information was handed to each EU ambassador in a sealed brown envelope.
Russia seized and annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last month, and its armed supporters have now taken control over swathes of Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland.
So far, the US and EU have imposed only targeted sanctions against a list of Russian and Ukrainian individuals and firms, which Moscow has openly mocked. Washington and Brussels say they are working on far tougher measures.
The Ukrainian government confirmed that six of its armoured vehicles were now in the hands of separatists. Photos of their number markings showed they were among vehicles deployed earlier in the government's attempted "anti-terrorist" operation.
Kiev had sent the convoy of paratroops to capture an airfield, the start of an operation to reclaim towns held by separatists who have declared an independent "People's Republic" in the industrial Donbass region.
The Ukrainian government and its Western allies believe Russian agents are co-ordinating the uprising. Moscow denies it is involved and says Kiev is precipitating civil war by sending troops to put down the revolt.
The Kiev government is seeking to reassert control without bloodshed, which it fears would precipitate a Russian invasion.
The operation is the first test of Kiev's under-funded army, which had until now played no role in six months of internal unrest. The government seems to have resorted to using troops after losing faith that police in the east would stay loyal.
The government troops began their operation on Tuesday, arriving by helicopter to take control of an airfield at Kramatorsk. They drove armoured personnel carriers flying the Ukrainian flag into the town in the early morning.
But six of those vehicles later rumbled into Slaviansk, 15km away, with Russian and separatist flags and armed men in motley combat fatigues on top. They stopped outside the separatist-occupied town hall.
Some Ukrainian troops were also taken to Slaviansk with the vehicles, although it was not immediately clear whether they had deserted or were coerced into coming. People in the town said some were sent home in buses.
One soldier guarding one of the vehicles said he was a member of Ukraine's 25th paratrooper division, the unit sent by Kiev to recapture Slaviansk and Kramatorsk.
"All the soldiers and the officers are here. We are all boys who won't shoot our own people," he said, adding that his men had had no food for four days until local residents fed them.
The defence ministry in Kiev said the vehicles had been captured. "A column was blocked by a crowd of local people in Kramatorsk with members of a Russian diversionary-terrorist group among them," it said. "As a result, extremists seized the equipment."
Above Slaviansk, a Ukrainian jet fighter carried out several minutes of aerobatics over the town's main square.
Back in Kramatorsk, 15 vehicles from the Ukrainian military convoy sent to recapture the town were stuck near a railroad, blockaded by unarmed local residents. A Ukrainian officer said his men were not prepared to fire on fellow Ukrainians.
"I am a Ukrainian officer, that's the first thing. The other is that I will not shoot at my own people no matter what," said the officer who said he could not give his name as he was not authorised to speak to the media.
"I want things to be normal, people to go back home, not sit in some fields with weapons. I want children to see weapons only on TV ... I want us to live together as we were. And I want to be back home to my wife and child."
The crowd blockaded the troops until the commander of the unit, Colonel Oleksander Schvets, agreed to order his men to hand over the firing pins from their rifles to a separatist leader.
The crowd then allowed the troops to drive back to their base in Dnipropetrovsk, a southern city.
The pro-Russian separatists began the uprising in the east by seizing government buildings in three cities on April 6, and have tightened their grip in recent days.
Their armed paramilitaries now control buildings in about 10 towns and have seized hundreds of weapons. Two people were killed on Sunday in Slaviansk, including a Ukrainian state security agent shot dead.
Kiev calls the uprising a blatant repeat of the seizure of Crimea, where armed pro-Russian partisans also occupied buildings, declared independence and proclaimed themselves in charge of state bodies.
The main difference so far is that Russian troops have not appeared overtly as they did in Crimea, where Moscow already had military bases.
Nato says there are 40,000 Russian soldiers amassed on the frontier, forces which could capture eastern Ukraine in days.
Hopes are faint for any progress at the talks in Geneva today.
As in the case of Crimea last month, diplomacy appears to have fallen far behind the pace of events on the ground, with pro-Russian partisans establishing control of territory before Western countries can muster a response.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to speak today at an annual question and answer session with citizens, which could signal how far he intends to go in Ukraine.
A triumphant speech he gave in March justifying the annexation of Crimea has been seen as a decisive moment in Russia's relations with the West, signalling Moscow no longer feels bound by customary rules governing the use of force.
Putin told German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a telephone call late on Tuesday that Kiev had "embarked on an anti-constitutional course" by using the army.
"The sharp escalation of the conflict puts the country, in effect, on the brink of civil war," the Kremlin quoted him as saying.
Germany rejects call to remove tanks from WWII memorial
AFP/Berlin
The German government has rejected a call by two newspapers to remove Russian tanks from a World War II memorial in central Berlin in protest against spiralling tensions in Ukraine.
The top-selling daily Bild and local tabloid B.Z. launched a petition drive on Tuesday to urge parliament to send a message to Moscow against last month's annexation of Crimean peninsula and the military build-up on Ukraine's eastern border.
However Chancellor Angela Merkel's deputy spokesman Georg Streiter quashed the bid yesterday, noting that Berlin had signed a 1990 treaty with Russia pledging to "respect, maintain and care for" the Soviet war monuments in Germany in their current form.
"The German government complies with this commitment and honours this particular way of commemorating fallen Red Army soldiers," he told reporters.
The Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten park, one of three large Russian monuments in the German capital, is dedicated to the 80,000 Red Army troops killed during the Battle of Berlin in the spring of 1945.
It was erected just months after the end of World War II and stands near the Reichstag parliament building and the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of Germany's post-Cold War reunification.
The memorial features several columns, a giant statue of a Russian soldier and two T-34 tanks.
Germany's criticism of Russia during the crisis in Ukraine, a former Soviet state, has at times been muted by the countries' close trade ties but also by the weight of Berlin's war-time guilt.
An estimated 20mn Soviet citizens are believed to have died in the conflict unleashed by Nazi Germany.
Transdniestr calls on EU to recognise breakaway region
AFP/Tiraspol, Transdniestr
The leader of Moldova's breakaway region of Transdniestr has called on the European Union to recognise the statelet as independent to ensure stability in the region amid the standoff between Ukraine and Russia.
"The European Union must recognise Transdniestr which does not present and will not present any risk for it," the region's president Yevgeny Shevchuk told AFP in an interview. "Only in this case will a zone of stability be created in the region."
His comments came as the region's parliament passed a resolution asking both Russia and the United Nations to recognise its independence but stopped short of asking Moscow to take over the territory as it did with Crimea.
Shevchuk also insisted that for the moment he was only seeking recognition of Transdniestr and did not want to enter into "hypothetical suppositions" about other moves.
"What happens in the next steps must be determined by the citizens of our republic," he said.
