Ukraine takes back control of police station in Luhansk
UKRAINIAN forces have raised their national flag over a police station in the city of Luhansk which was for months under rebel control, Kiev said yesterday, in what could be a breakthrough in Ukraine’s efforts to crush pro-Moscow separatists.
Ukrainian officials allege though that the rebels are fighting a desperate rearguard action to hold on to Luhansk — which is their supply route into Russia — and say the flow of weapons and fighters from Russia has accelerated.
The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia were preparing to meet for talks on the conflict in Berlin yesterday, though it seemed likely that the diplomacy could be overshadowed by fast-moving developments on the battlefield.
Russia denies helping the rebels and accuses Kiev, backed by the West, of triggering a humanitarian crisis through indiscriminate use of force against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who reject the Ukrainian government’s rule.
A Ukrainian military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said government forces fought separatists in a neighbourhood of Luhansk city on Saturday and took control of the Zhovtneviy neighbourhood police station.
Separatist officials in Luhansk could not be reached by telephone, and a separatist spokeswoman in Donetsk, the other rebel stronghold, said she did not know what had happened in Luhansk.
A photograph posted on Twitter appeared to show a Ukrainian flag on the front of the police station, but it could not be independently verified. If confirmed, the taking of the police station is significant because the city of Luhansk has for several months been a rebel redoubt where Kiev’s writ has not run.
Ukrainian troops have been closing in on the city, but had not previously been able to get forces inside the city limits. The separatists still control sections of the border linking Luhansk region to Russia.
The four-month-old conflict in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east has reached a critical phase, with Kiev and western governments watching nervously to see if Russia will intervene in support of the increasingly besieged rebels.
The rebels have responded to the reverses with defiant rhetoric, and the fighting continues.
Ukrainian authorities said that the separatists shot down a warplane. The pilot ejected and was located and recovered after a search, a military spokesman, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, told Reuters.
In a sign of concern at the latest rebel comments, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko agreed in a phone call on Saturday that deliveries of weapons to separatists in Ukraine must stop and a ceasefire must be achieved, a German government spokesman said.
The crisis has dragged relations between Russia and the West to their lowest point since the Cold War and set off a round of trade restrictions that are hurting economies in both Russia and Europe.
Adding to the tensions, Russia and Ukraine have been at loggerheads for days over a convoy of 280 Russian trucks carrying water, food and medicine. It was despatched for eastern Ukraine but has been parked up for several days in Russia near the border. Kiev has said the convoy could be a Trojan Horse for Russia to get weapons to the rebels, a notion that Moscow has dismissed as absurd.