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Dozens of Separatists Killed in Ukraine Army Attack Russians Revealed Among Ukraine Fighters
(about 9 hours later)
DONETSK, Ukraine — Separatists reported suffering heavy losses in an offensive by the Ukrainian military to retake a strategic provincial airport in Donetsk, their leaders said on Tuesday, while a team of European security monitors lost contact with their headquarters, raising fears of kidnapping. DONETSK, Ukraine — For weeks, rumors have flown about the foreign fighters involved in the deepening conflict in Ukraine’s troubled east, each one stranger than the next: mercenaries from an American company, Blackwater; Russian special forces; and even Chechen soldiers of fortune.
Some of the accounts of rebel losses were conflicting, in part because the fighting continued into Tuesday morning and it was difficult to retrieve the dead. Schools were closed and city authorities warned residents not to leave their homes. Yet there they were on Tuesday afternoon, resting outside a hospital here: Chechen men with automatic rifles, some bearing bloodstained bandages, protecting their wounded comrades in a city hospital after a firefight with the Ukrainian Army.
The clearest count came from Donetsk’s mayor, Oleksandr Lukyanchenko, who said that about 50 people had been killed, including two civilians, and that 43 others had been wounded. Other counts by rebels put the death toll as high as 100. “We received an invitation to help our brothers,” said one of the fighters in heavily accented Russian. He said he was from Grozny and had fought in the Chechen War that began in 1999. He said he arrived here last week with several dozen men to join a pro-Russian militia group.
“Our losses are serious,” said Alexander Borodai, the prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. “But our opponents’ losses are not less, and maybe even more.” The scene at the hospital was new evidence that fighters from Russia are an increasingly visible part of the conflict here, a development that raises new questions about that country’s role in the unrest. Moscow has denied that its regular soldiers are part of the conflict, and there is no evidence that they are. But motley assortments of fighters from other war zones that are intimately associated with Russia would be unlikely to surface against the powerful will of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, experts said.
The Ukrainian military conducted a major operation on Monday to take back the airport here, which militants had seized just hours before. It was the first aggressive move against the fighters in weeks of what had been seen as relatively ineffective military maneuvers and came just one day after a national election in which a Ukrainian billionaire, Petro O. Poroshenko, won in a landslide. Mr. Poroshenko has pledged to take on the separatists, whom he has compared to Somali pirates. The disclosure of Russian nationals among the fighters here muddies an already murky picture of the complex connections and allegiances that are beginning to form. While their presence does not draw a straight line to the Kremlin, it raises the possibility of a more subtle Russian game that could keep Ukraine unbalanced for years.
A Ukrainian military spokesman in Kiev, Vladyslav Selezniov, said the military was now fully in control of the airport and its territory. He said one Ukrainian soldier had been lightly wounded in the fighting and but gave no details of other casualties. He said about 200 rebels had been concentrated in a new terminal of the airport, and that they had been “annihilated and scattered,” during the attack, after the military issued them an ultimatum they ignored. The revelation about foreign fighters received an unexpected official confirmation on Tuesday, when the mayor of Donetsk, Aleksandr A. Lukyanchenko, said at least eight people with Russian passports were among the wounded rebels who had been taken to the city’s hospitals.
The monitoring team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was on a routine mission east of Donetsk when it disappeared around 6 p.m. on Monday, the group reported. He said the Russians were from Moscow, and the cities of Grozny and Gudermes in Chechnya, a republic that is part of Russia and whose leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, was installed by the Kremlin to bring the region under control after bitter wars starting in the 1990s. On Tuesday, Mr. Kadyrov denied any connection to the fighters.
“We have been unable to re-establish communication until now,” the group said in a statement on its website. “We are continuing with our efforts and utilizing our contacts on the ground. The Ukrainian government as well as regional authorities have been informed of the situation.” Mr. Lukyanchenko also said that residents of Crimea, the peninsula in the Black Sea that Russia seized in March, were also among the wounded.
In Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said that the violence in Donetsk undermined Mr. Poroshenko’s vows ahead of the election to end the military operations in the east. Instead, noting causalities on both sides, Mr. Lavrov said “they have a real war there so far.” The Kremlin has said it would work with the government of Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian billionaire elected in a landslide on Sunday and accepted congratulations from President Obama on Tuesday.
Mr. Lavrov, who on Monday indicated that Russia was prepared to work with the new government emerging after the election, said that intensifying the military operations would not help resolve the conflict, and he called for an immediate halt. He suggested that ending the violence would be a criterion for the prospects of improved relations with Russia. Mr. Poroshenko has pledged to crush the separatists who seized public buildings in two regions in eastern Ukraine in March. But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, suggested Tuesday that ending the violence would be a criterion for improved relations, a line that could leave Ukraine’s new government in a tight spot.
“We hope he will act in the interests of the Ukrainian people as a whole,” Mr. Lavrov said after meeting with Turkey’s foreign minister. “If this is the case, he will find a serious and reliable partner in Russia.” Many here say the fighters speak to the shadowy nature of a conflict that sometimes seems manufactured. “It’s irritating but not very surprising,” said Stanislav Kucherenko, 32, a massage therapist who lives near the airport and woke to the sound of shelling Tuesday. “It shows that this war is not clean. It is artificially created. If this an uprising by the Donetsk People’s Republic, what are foreigners doing here?”
The mood had lightened somewhat in the area around the airport a day after the violent clashes. Streets were largely empty and the direction of events was unpredictable. Two empty ammunition boxes were seen near the scene of yesterday’s battle. A few villagers sat nearby, with some of the men, shirtless in the heat, drinking beer. The men are Donetsk’s worst kept secret. Several appeared on a CNN report at a military parade this weekend, and others were caught on a Vice News video, saying, “We are volunteers, Chechens, Afghans and Muslims who have come to protect Russia, to protect Russians, to protect the interests of this country.”
At the Donetsk train station, an announcer over a loudspeaker told passengers to wait in an underground passageway. She said that tickets were no longer for sale to points outside the Donetsk region and that trains were running several hours late. It is unclear what portion of the rebel fighters the men represent, who they work for, or whether they were paid. The soldier at the hospital Tuesday said all the men were volunteers, a commonly given explanation but one locals say is not convincing.
One family standing with their two deaf daughters who study at a special school here had been waiting in the underground passageway for two hours for a train that would take them to their hometown. The school was closed after yesterday’s shooting. “They say they are patriots,” Mr. Kucherenko said of the foreign fighters. “I don’t think there are that many patriots.”
“I have no words for this,” said Nikolai, their father, as his two daughters, ages 11 and 16, looked on. He declined to give his full name, fearing for his safety. “What will happen to us?” The Chechen fighter at the hospital, who declined to give his name, seemed to be losing his resolve. The unit had a commander who had given an order to stay and fight for the city. Otherwise, he said, he would be happy to go home. “I haven’t slept for four nights,” he said, resting his head on a wooden bench outside the hospital with a Kalashnikov across his knees.
At the bus station near the airport, drivers said they were finding new routes around what appeared to be new military maneuvers. Locals were angry at the Kiev government for what they said was a military attack on their homeland. Donetsk was mostly quiet on Tuesday. Schools were closed, and residents were warned not to leave their homes. But signs of Monday’s battle remained. A truck that had been carrying rebel fighters and was hit by Ukrainians lay on its side.
“They call us terrorists but they are the ones who have come to our home, our land to fight,” said Vadim Voit, a driver who said that he took part in a battle against Ukrainian soldiers last week in nearby Volnovakha, standing outside his small passenger bus at the depot. Many pro-Russian residents praised the foreign fighters, saying they were all that stood between them and what they saw as a hostile Ukrainian force from Kiev. Yevgeny Matvichyuk, 26, who is from the embattled city of Slovyansk, said he had spoken with two foreign fighters, one from North Ossetia, a republic in Russia, and another from Tajikistan in Central Asia.
“Kiev is just not listening to us,” he said. “We can’t make peace with them now.” “They said we came from Russia to help you,” he said standing at the bus depot in Donetsk. “What’s wrong with that?”