Dozens die in fierce fighting
Donetsk, Ukraine – Dozens of dead insurgents lay piled in a van outside a morgue yesterday and a rebel said more were on the way.
Bomb disposal experts disarmed a mortar round lodged in a corpse.
A wrecked and blood-soaked truck at the Donetsk airport showed the grisly aftermath of battle. The fight for eastern Ukraine seems to have taken a ferocious turn, as both sides step up their attacks after the rebellious regions mostly boycotted a presidential election that delivered a decisive winner.
After a day and night of the heaviest and most sustained assault by Ukrainian Government forces to date, the pro-Russia separatist movement is now facing an emboldened and resolute national leadership. With Monday’s election of billionaire Petro Poroshenko to the presidency, Ukraine has received grudging and tentatively positive diplomatic overtures from Russia.
Leaders of the 28 European Union countries, meeting yesterday in Brussels, said they expected Russia to co-operate with the newly elected president.
The EU heads of state and government said Russia should ‘‘use its leverage on the armed separatists to de-escalate the situation in eastern Ukraine’’.
But with evidence that irregulars are continuing to pour into Ukraine from Russia, it remains unclear whether Russia is encouraging fighters whose attack on Monday on the Donetsk International Airport showed their increasing aggression.
What is certain is that the Ukrainian Government’s antiinsurgent operation has been kicked into a higher gear, with the military unleashing fighter jets, helicopter gunships and heavy artillery. Government opponents insist they have taken up arms to defend eastern Ukraine’s Russianspeaking population and they have appealed to Russia for assistance. Ukraine condemns the insurgents as ‘‘terrorists’’ bent on tearing the country apart.
Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko said 40 people, including two civilians, were killed in fighting after government troops thwarted a rebel attempt to seize the airport, Ukraine’s second largest.
The bodies of about 30 insurgents were taken yesterday to the Kalinin Hospital morgue, said Leonid Baranov of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The fighters had been wounded and were being taken to a hospital in a truck when it was shot up by government forces, he said. Inside the morgue, bodies were stacked crudely in heaps. Some were missing limbs. Experts removed an unexploded mortar round that was embedded in one man’s abdomen.
Baranov said up to 100 rebels were probably killed in combat but many bodies had not yet been recovered because they were in areas under government control.
‘‘As they are controlling the airport and the fight was there . . . we cannot right now identify exactly how many victims we have,’’ Baranov said, adding that hundreds were also wounded.
A bloody flatbed truck stood wrecked outside the airport, with body parts and teeth strewn around it.
Rebels said it had been fired on by a helicopter.
After being squeezed out of the airport following hours of intense fighting, insurgents called in several hundred reinforcements.
Many were from a unit calling itself the Vostok – or East – Battalion, which Donetsk People’s Republic representatives have said includes combatants from Russia’s North Caucasus.
Later, Ukrainian forces pounded rebel positions, forcing the fighters to retreat in disarray.
One overturned truck near the airport showed signs of having struck a tree at high speed, and sporadic gunfire was heard throughout the day around the airport.