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Version 5 Version 6
Fighting Again Forces International Team in Ukraine to Retreat Fighting Again Forces International Team in Ukraine to Retreat
(about 3 hours later)
SHAKHTYORSK, Ukraine — Artillery fire blocked the route to the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner in eastern Ukraine on Monday, forcing an international delegation of European monitors and police officials to turn back without reaching the crash site. SHAKHTYORSK, Ukraine — Fierce fighting gripped a dozen towns in eastern Ukraine on Monday, blocking an international police force from reaching the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which is now near, or even in the middle of, a battlefield.
The setback in efforts to secure the site, to recover any more bodies and to begin an independent investigation came as Navi Pillay, the most senior United Nations human rights official, said the downing of the Boeing 777-200 on July 17 may constitute a war crime. She did not ascribe blame. Fighting near the crash site forced a convoy of 20 cars carrying Dutch and Australian police officers to turn back. The police officers were hoping to secure the area to permit the recovery of remaining bodies from the jetliner crash and to enable an international investigation.
Ukrainian government troops are trying to retake control of the region around the crash site from pro-Russia rebels. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said on Monday that the United Nations should guarantee security in the area, and he called on Ukraine to respect a United Nations Security Council resolution of July 21 that called on all parties to refrain from any action that would complicate the investigation. The road to the site is now violently contested between pro-Russia rebel fighters and the Ukrainian military because it is also a route for supplies to reach the rebels holding Donetsk, the provincial capital, and for their wounded to be evacuated from the city.
United Nations monitors and Ukrainian officials displayed growing concern over allegations of human rights violations in eastern Ukraine. A report by United Nations rights monitors, released on Monday, said that “a total breakdown of law and order and a reign of fear and terror have been inflicted by armed groups on the population.” The convoy’s main intention on Monday was to test the safety of the access route for larger groups of investigators, who have been unable to reach the crash site.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister of Ukraine, said on Monday that officials had found a mass grave containing 14 bodies in the center of the city of Slovyansk, which was a rebel stronghold until government troops recaptured it earlier this month. The group set out from Donetsk and stopped in Shakhtyorsk, one of the towns being fought over Monday, when artillery explosions could be heard ahead. The convoy started forward again, but then turned back before reaching the crash site because of the risk to the delegation, even though the separatists were willing to let it proceed, apparently toward Ukrainian army positions.
The Malaysia Airlines plane, Flight 17, was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it fell from the sky in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, killing all 298 people on board. Ukrainian and American officials say that a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired by separatist rebels brought down the jetliner. The Kremlin and the rebels have denied the accusation and say Ukraine is to blame for the crash. Fighting raged farther east along the highway as well, overnight and through the day. Outside Shakhty-20, a coal mining town on the road, a photographer who was passing through Monday morning saw the scorched hulks of Ukrainian armored personnel carriers in the road, and the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers all about.
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Monday that an analysis of the airliner’s flight recorders showed that shrapnel from a rocket blast had caused “massive explosive decompression.” The Ukrainian offensive was intensive enough that the separatists’ military commander — a Russian citizen who uses the name Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter — held a rare news conference on Monday to deny rumors that he had fled the city and that important positions had fallen, as the Ukrainian government had announced. He also denied that the rebels were responsible for downing Flight 17.
It was not clear how that interpretation had been made known to officials in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, because the flight recorders are being examined in Britain. But Mr. Lysenko’s remarks were in line with other Western accounts and earlier independent analysis of wreckage from the plane, showing signs of shrapnel. “Everywhere, the fight was tough,” he said. “They attacked from the north and the south. As a result of the fierce fighting, most of the advance was pushed back.”
Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, repeated the Kremlin’s call for the United States to make public whatever evidence it had to back up the accusation that the plane had been brought down by a missile fired from rebel-controlled territory. The Malaysian airliner was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17 when it fell from the sky over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. Ukrainian and American officials say that a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired by separatist rebels brought the jetliner down. The Kremlin and the rebels say the Ukrainian government was responsible for the crash.
“We do not understand why the Americans, who say that they have strong evidence to support their accusation, why they do not show that evidence,” he said at an hourlong news conference. Asked at the news conference if he had shot down the plane, Mr. Strelkov said that he would not have known how, even though he once served in an air defense unit as a draftee. “I was in the guard unit. Do you think that a soldier in the guard, who held in his hands nothing other than an assault rifle, could shoot an airliner?”
The United States has released some satellite photographs that it says shows Russian-supplied missile launchers in rebel-held territory and evidence that they had been used. The spokesman for the Russian defense ministry, Gen. Igor Konashenkov, called the images “fakes” on Monday, according to Russian news agencies. He was quoted as saying that the released images lacked precise locations and were too low in resolution to be definitive. He denied that his forces had the type of missile the United States says brought down the plane. “I did not have under my command any Buk systems, so I could not have ordered them to shoot at the airplane of Malaysia Airlines,” he said. “I don’t know how the airplane was shot down, in what way. I just know it was shot down. That is all. I can say only that my subordinates did not do it.”
The general accused Ukraine and the United States of collaborating to create false evidence, and said the images had been manufactured at the security service headquarters in Kiev. Mr. Strelkov claimed his soldiers had killed foreign mercenaries “of Negroid race” and left the bodies of the black men on a battlefield to the east of Donetsk as proof that non-Ukrainian soldiers were aiding the government side.
In eastern Ukraine, a large delegation of European monitors and unarmed Dutch and Australian police officers set out from the provincial capital, Donetsk, on Monday, trying to reach the crash site. Though several forensic experts accompanied the group, the main intention of the journey was to test the safety of the access route for larger groups of investigators who are seeking to recover bodies and evidence. In Kiev, Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the government’s security council, said the Ukrainian offensive had made gains. He said the military had captured Savur-Mohyla, a hilltop World War II monument complex that rebels have used for weeks as a stronghold. The claim could not be independently verified. In Donetsk, Mr. Strelkov said the site had not fallen.
The convoy left from an area of Donetsk under rebel control, and separatist fighters led the way in commandeered Ukrainian police cars, with their lights flashing. They were followed by vehicles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a car carrying the heads of the Dutch and Australian police contingents. The downing of Flight 17 may amount to a war crime, according to Navi Pillay, the United Nations’ top human rights official. Ms. Pillay, who is based in Geneva, said in a statement on Monday that clashes in eastern Ukraine were “extremely alarming,” and she assailed the pro-Russia rebels for imposing a “reign of fear and terror” in the region.
Separatists at checkpoints along the road waved the convoy through. But at Shakhtyorsk, the group stopped for a time, and artillery explosions could be heard on the road ahead. The convoy inched forward again, but then turned back because of the danger. Ms. Pillay’s assessment added a further dimension to the charged debate over the downing of the jetliner, which has prompted Western moves to tighten sanctions against Russia. “This violation of international law, given the prevailing circumstances, may amount to a war crime,” she said. “Every effort will be made to ensure that anyone committing serious violations of international law, including war crimes, will be brought to justice, no matter who they are.”
Mr. Lysenko, the government spokesman in Kiev, acknowledged that Ukrainian armed forces were in the region, but he denied that they were fighting near the wreckage of the Malaysian plane on Monday. “The Ukrainian military has approached the site of the crash, but is not engaged in any active combat,” he said at a news briefing in Kiev. Ms. Pillay made her remarks as United Nations monitors issued a fourth monthly report on the fighting in eastern Ukraine. The report said that although “casualty figures are hard to gauge reliably,” the best available estimates are that at least 1,129 people have been killed and 3,442 wounded since mid-April. Those figures were based partly on “conservative” estimates by the 39-member United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and by the World Health Organization, the statement said.
In a report issued in Geneva, human rights monitors for the United Nations said that although “casualty figures are hard to gauge reliably,” the best available estimates show that at least 1,129 people have been killed and 3,442 wounded in eastern Ukraine since mid-April. In Moscow on Monday, the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, repeated a Russian call for the United States to make public whatever proof it has that Flight 17 was brought down by a missile fired from rebel-controlled territory. “We do not understand why the Americans, who say that they have strong evidence to support their accusation, why they do not show that evidence,” he said at a news conference.
Those figures were based partly on “conservative” estimates by the 39-member United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and by the World Health Organization, the report said. Mr. Lavrov also said that the United Nations should guarantee security at the crash site, and he called on Ukraine to respect a United Nations Security Council resolution adopted on July 21, calling on all parties to refrain from any action that would complicate the investigation.
The United Nations report said more than 100,000 people had fled combat zones and sought refuge in other parts of Ukraine. In eastern Ukraine, the main rebel group, which calls itself the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Monday that it had temporarily changed leaders, replacing one Russian citizen with another. The group denied that the intensified fighting had prompted the change.
Since mid-April, it said, 812 people had been abducted or detained by rebels acting with impunity. The group said Vladimir Antufeyev would take the place of Aleksandr Borodai, assuming both civilian and military leadership in Donetsk while Mr. Borodai is in Russia, assessing the treatment of refugees from eastern Ukraine. Until 2012, Mr. Antufeyev served as minister of state security in Transnistria, a pro-Russia separatist region of Moldova.
“Some of those detained by the armed groups are local politicians, public officials and employees of the local coal mining industry; the majority are ordinary citizens, including teachers, journalists, members of the clergy and students,” the report said. The crisis in eastern Ukraine has drawn an array of reciprocal threats and accusations between Moscow and the West. The Obama administration stepped up its pressure on Moscow over the weekend by releasing photos that it said showed that Russian forces had fired across the border into Ukraine.
It added that there had also been reports of detentions by Ukrainian government forces, as well as “some cases of Ukrainian nationals who allegedly have been taken and are currently detained in the Russian Federation on various charges.” Mr. Lavrov dismissed those photos on Monday, saying “Let the experts deal with them,” and told reporters that if the United States and Ukraine’s other allies were concerned about cross-border exchanges, they should have agreed weeks ago to a plan for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to be stationed at two border crossings.
In Kiev, Mr. Gerashchenko, the interior ministry adviser, said that so far, investigators were able to identify four of the 14 bodies that were found in a mass grave in a grassy area in the center of Slovyansk, near an obelisk commemorating an unknown soldier. Mr. Gerashchenko said investigators had not yet determined how the victims had died, who had killed them or why. He said it appeared that some may have been separatists, while others may have been individuals captured and even “tortured” by separatists. “That would prevent the rumors that those checkpoints are used to transport weapons and people from Russia to Ukraine,” Mr. Lavrov said. Critics have said that monitoring just the two border stations is insufficient.
In Brussels, meanwhile, ambassadors from the 28 member states of the European Union were expected to resume meetings on Monday afternoon to discuss placing Russian oligarchs on a list of individuals facing travel restrictions and asset freezes. The move against the oligarchs is a noteworthy step in what has become a slow drip of sanctions and punitive measures since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March. Mr. Lavrov also said he wished the United States and the Europeans would call for a cease-fire in Ukraine as fervently as they have demanded one in Gaza, and listed what he said were missed opportunities going back to February for the West to have resolved the crisis in Ukraine by diplomatic means.
So far the only individuals to have faced such sanctions are those determined to have direct ties to the destabilization of Ukraine. By taking the further step of sanctioning the oligarchs, the Europeans aim to raise pressure on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by penalizing some of the wealthiest people in the country who form part of his inner circle.
But in Moscow, Mr. Lavrov said that while he evidently did not welcome the measures, he did not think that Europeans in particular wanted to impose them.
“We do not want to act tit-for-tat,” he said, adding that he was sure Russia could overcome any difficulties caused by the sanctions. “Maybe we will be even more independent and more confident in our own course,” he said.