This picture taken on August 31 shows a burning Ukrainian patrol boat in the Azov Sea near Mariupol, on the Azov Sea coast, where the Kiev government still controls Mariupol. Rocket launchers were used to fire on two Ukrainian boats of the border service patrolling about 5km (three miles) from the shore. Two border guards from one of the crews were missing, Kiev said.
AFP
Kiev
Ukrainian forces ceded a strategic eastern airport to pro-Russian insurgents yesterday as the government in Kiev accused Moscow of launching a “great war” that could claim tens of thousands of lives.
The sense of foreboding in Kiev came as European-mediated talks over the fast-escalating crisis opened in the Belarussian capital Minsk behind closed doors, attended by government, separatist and Russian envoys.
The rebels have launched a major counteroffensive in recent days that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies claim is backed by Russian forces – a charge Moscow denies.
Ukraine’s Defence Minister Valeriy Geletey vowed yesterday to “immediately mount defences against Russia, which is trying not only to secure positions held by terrorists before but to advance on other territories of Ukraine”.
“A great war arrived at our doorstep, the likes of which Europe has not seen since World War II,” he wrote on Facebook, warning of “tens of thousands of deaths”.
Russian agencies quoted rebel representatives demanding at the Belarus meeting that Kiev provides the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk with a “unique procedure” that would let them integrate closer with Russia.
The developments come a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin evoked for the first time that the issue of “statehood” should be brought up in talks on the crisis in the east, where fighting has killed over 2,600 people since mid-April.
Putin accused Europe of ignoring the Ukrainian military’s “direct targeting” of civilians in the conflict and said the offensive pushed by insurgents there were simply an attempt to expel Kiev’s forces from residential areas.
Kiev said that its forces south of the rebel hub of Luhansk were forced to retreat from the local airfield and a nearby village after withstanding artillery fire and battling a Russian tank battalion.
“There is direct, overt aggression against Ukraine from the neighbouring state,” Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said.
The retreat marked the latest setback for Ukrainian troops, which had been closing in on rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk until about a week ago, when the insurgents opened a new front in the south.
Since then, the rebels’ lightning offensive has forced Ukrainian army units to abandon numerous positions gear up for the defence the southeast and of the important southeastern port city of Mariupol, which had been peaceful for months after government troops routed the rebels in May.
AFP correspondents said the presence of Ukrainian army in the region has visibly decreased in recent days.
“The town is being erased off the face of the earth,” said Yelena Proidak, a resident of Petrovske, a town between Donetsk and Luhansk. “There is no normal life here.”
On the Azov Sea coast, where the Kiev government still controls the 500,000-strong Mariupol, rocket launchers were used to fire on two Ukrainian patrol boats about 5km (three miles) from the shore.
Two border guards from one of the crews went missing, Kiev said.
A senior Ukrainian security official told AFP on condition of anonymity that Russia’s goal was to “destabilise (Ukraine) and create a land corridor to Crimea”, the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Moscow in March but connected to Russia only by an old and overloaded ferry link.
Kiev and the West have repeatedly accused Russia of direct involvement in Ukraine, with Nato saying last week that Russia had more than 1,000 of its troops deployed in Ukraine and 20,000 massed along the border.
Rights activists in Moscow told AFP that up to 15,000 Russian soldiers had been sent across the Ukrainian border over the past two months.
Kiev’s security spokesman Andriy Lysenko has estimated the current number or Russian troops at 1,600.
Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said ahead of the Western military alliance’s two-day summit in Wales that opens on Thursday that the growing Russian threat meant the Cold War-era bloc must create a bigger presence in eastern Europe.
“We must face the reality that Russia ... considers Nato an adversary,” he told reporters. “We cannot afford to be naive.”
Kiev has asked Nato for help and President Poroshenko is expected to travel to Wales and meet with US President Barack Obama.
Russia has repeatedly denied helping the insurgency, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declaring yesterday that “there will be no military intervention (in Ukraine)”.
Lavrov also called for an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire” to be discussed in Minsk.
