Dawn assault shatters ceasefire
A stretch of Ukraine’s front line erupted in flames yesterday as a pitched battle featuring tanks, heavy artillery and hundreds of fighters threatened a return to fullblown hostilities.
The separatist assault on the town of Mariinka, about 16 kilometres west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, began in the early hours of the morning, raged through the day and had shredded the credibility of the region’s fragile ceasefire by nightfall.
The Ukrainian military reported that it had repelled waves of attacks involving up to 1000 enemy fighters backed by a dozen tanks and heavy artillery that was supposed to have been withdrawn under the terms of a truce agreed in Minsk in February.
Government forces fired back with their own heavy artillery in response to the ‘‘large-scale offensive’’, military chiefs said during the most intense day of clashes since Russian-backed separatists – almost certainly with Russian military support – routed Ukrainian forces from the key transport hub of Debaltseve immediately after the Minsk deal.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will lead a discussion among G7 leaders this weekend on renewing sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.
Vladimir Kononov, the Defence Minister of the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic, denied mounting an offensive and accused Ukrainian authorities of having broken the ceasefire by shelling its positions ‘‘along the whole front line’’ overnight, killing 15 fighters and civilians.
The claim was picked up by Russian state television news, which led with a report that Kiev had launched ‘‘new provocations’’.
Kononov said his men had then conducted ‘‘defensive operations for seven hours’’.
Igor Rutchenko, chief doctor at the Petrovski district hospital in western Donetsk, said he had been receiving wounded since ‘‘very early morning’’ and the number of patients had ‘‘soared to almost 90’’.
The Ukrainian military said its forces in Mariinka and the village of Krasnohorivka had come under attack at 4am from tanks, mortars, heavy artillery and small arms.
By mid-afternoon one Ukrainian soldier and one civilian had been killed in ‘‘very severe shelling’’, according to Tatyana Guba, from the administration in the neighbouring region of Dnipropetrovsk.
Buses and an aircraft had evacuated 12 of the 23 wounded soldiers and civilians to Dnipropetrovsk, she added.
Part of Mariinka was on fire, a military spokesman said.
While the Minsk ceasefire never completely quelled fighting that has killed more than 6400 people since April 2014, the violence had dropped notably in intensity before yesterday.
There have also been indications in the past month that the Kremlin is looking to stabilise the conflict in east Ukraine amid a tentative diplomatic re-engagement with the United States and Europe as the deadline for renewing European Union sanctions against Moscow looms this month.
Mariinka and Krasnohorivka had been spared all but sporadic shelling and gunfire since Ukrainian volunteers wrested back control of them from the separatists in a short battle last August.
On Tuesday a meeting of the ‘‘contact group’’ of Ukrainian and separatist negotiators in Minsk broke up and, as the fighting restarted yesterday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said: ‘‘Yesterday Russia scuppered the meeting of the trilateral contact group, and today it gave the order to their terrorists to begin a military operation.’’