Flashpoint as Kiev blocks aid
Donetsk – Ukraine was heading for a new confrontation with Russia last night after announcing that it would refuse to allow a convoy of up to 300 Russian aid trucks to enter the war-torn east of the country, and insisting that all goods on the trucks be unloaded at the border.
The convoy, painted white and said to be loaded with 2000 tonnes of aid ranging from baby food to sleeping bags, left the Moscow region for Ukraine, a journey that was expected to take one or two days. Their stock was supposed to cross the border to supply increasingly desperate residents of Luhansk and Donetsk, the last main pro-Russian separatist-held cities that are being besieged and blockaded by the Ukrainian military.
The Russian foreign ministry said that the convoy would cross the border under the aegis of the Red Cross. However, a Red Cross spokesman said that, although the organisation had agreed in principle to an international humanitarian effort involving Russia, he had ‘‘no information about the content’’ of the Russian trucks and did not know where they were heading.
Ukraine later confirmed that it would not allow the convoy to enter the country at all, amid suspicions that it might be concealing weapons to support embattled separatist troops. ‘‘We will not consider the possibility of any movement of the Russian column on the territory of Ukraine,’’ Valeriy Chaly, deputy head of the presidential administration, said.
He added that any aid would have to be unloaded at the border and put on to transport provided by the Red Cross. No Russian personnel from the convoy would be allowed to enter Ukraine either, he said.
As the row over the aid convoy deepened, residents of Donetsk and Luhansk faced growing shortages and a stream of Ukrainian attacks.
In Grabari, an area of industrial land on the northwest edge of Donetsk targeted by Ukrainian artillery, an out-of-work machine operator showed the small cellar under his house that he squeezes into when the bombing starts.
Anatoly, 40, sent his two sons away to relatives in west Ukraine two months ago, and his wife followed a month later. He has had electricity for only four days in the past three and a half weeks.
As in much of the city, running water is available for only two hours a day, so he collects it in the bath. Most evenings he sits reading on his vine-covered terrace until his dog howls, a reliable indicator that the shelling is about to start. In the cellar, which is piled high with pickled vegetables and jam and also stocked with sausages and Ukrainian salo , he cannot stand up straight, and he can touch all four walls without straightening his arms. ‘‘I’ve spent about ten nights down there,’’ he said folding himself into a ball and laughing. ‘‘I try to sleep.’’
The Ukrainian army is less than a mile away and the war is getting closer.
More than 1300 people, many of them civilians, have died since pro-Moscow rebels took up arms against Kiev’s authority in east Ukraine four months ago. Government forces have squeezed the rebels back into the two cities and small pockets of territory in between them, an advance that has raised fears of a Russian invasion to save the insurgency from a humiliating defeat, possibly under the pretext of a humanitarian intervention.
The response to the convoy is complicated by the existence of a genuine and growing humanitarian crisis. It is worst in Luhansk, the region’s second city, which has been without power or running water for more than a week. Landlines and mobile telephones do not work. Fuel has run out. Most people who remain cower in cellars. Refugees who have made it out tell of dead bodies left in the streets.
The Ukrainian army and the privately funded armed bands of volunteers who serve as its shock troops surround Donetsk, which the military has identified as its most important target. Fighting rages at every exit point. Civilians have been advised to leave, but the designated ‘‘humanitarian corridor’’ for them to escape by is blocked by rebels.
Less than a hundred metres away, three generations of a family recalled how a missile exploded in their courtyard last Friday, wounding both grandparents. It sent shrapnel tearing through their home that ripped holes in clothes in a wardrobe.
Tatiana, 21, a student, heard it coming. Her mother, Elena, said: ‘‘We had time to unplug the television, light a candle and say the first word of a prayer.’’