Fighting intensifies in E. Ukraine after breakdown of cease-fire

Andrew E. Kramer MOSCOW — The war in rebel-held eastern Ukraine has escalated sharply this week, with the heaviest fighting in nearly a year, European observers and Western diplomats reported Wednesday.

The fighting broke out in the midst of a snowstorm overnight Tuesday and has continued unabated since, the observers say. While skirmishes are common, the heavy artillery barrages have been the thickest since a flare-up in February.

Ukrainian authorities linked the escalation to the Russian military’s decision to withdraw officers from a joint Russian and Ukrainian liaison group that had assisted in monitoring the shaky ceasefire deal, known as the Minsk 2 agreement.

The Russian Foreign Ministry placed the blame for that on Ukraine, saying the Ukrainians had been intimidating the officers and that “all responsibility for possible consequences lies fully on the Ukrainian side.”

Since then, a Ukrainian village and a town have been hit with rocket-artillery barrages, wounding eight people and damaging about 50 homes, and at least eight Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. The fighting has also drawn perilously close to a water-treatment plant that stores poisonous chlorine gas, alarming Western officials.

“This is considered extremely dangerous,” Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, said of the fighting that has now come within about 500 yards of the plant. Pipes that transport the gas — used mostly to disinfect water today, but as a chemical weapon during World War I — are now vulnerable.

“If those were to go off in this area, which is close to where people live, it could be potentially devastating,” Nauert said.

The breakdown in the peacekeeping effort began when the Russians withdrew from the Joint Center for Ceasefire Control and Coordination. That is the organization that had helped to monitor the cease-fire and allowed Ukraine’s military to communicate with rebel commanders through Russian officers who acted as intermediaries.

Ertugrul Apakan, the head of the mission in Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, another group monitoring the cease-fire, said the number of violations had reached levels not recorded since a flare-up in February.

The escalation began even before the Russians had left their posts, but picked up afterward. OSCE observers, who record explosions and gunshots near the front, had counted 16,000 cease-fire violations over a weeklong period this month.

Kurt Volker, the Trump administration’s special envoy for the Ukraine crisis, warned in a speech in Washington this week that “a lot of people think that this has somehow turned into a sleepy, frozen conflict and it’s stable.” He said that view of the Ukraine war was “completely wrong.”

Volker said the shelling overnight Tuesday was “one of the most violent nights” of the war, which began in spring 2014 as Russia supported separatists in two regions of eastern Ukraine after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president fled the country.

In the nighttime fighting that Volker referred to, the government-controlled village of Novoluhanske was struck by a barrage of Grad rockets.