10 Are Killed in Ukraine as Diplomacy Hits a Wall
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Version 0 of 1. MOSCOW — A shell or rocket fired at an army checkpoint in southeastern Ukraine on Tuesday gutted a passenger bus and killed 10 people in one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since a precarious cease-fire in the conflict was negotiated in early September. The attack, which Ukrainian officials said was a result of a rocket fired by pro-Russian separatists, coincided with the collapse of plans for a peace summit meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, among the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, leaving no near-term prospects for high-level negotiations to settle the conflict. A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, said this week that she would not attend the meeting without greater evidence of President Vladimir V. Putin’s commitment to the cease-fire, which was agreed to in Minsk, Belarus, last September. It has been regularly violated since. A meeting of the foreign ministers of the four countries in Berlin on Monday achieved little progress. With diplomacy failing, violence has surged along the contested borders of Ukraine and the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Heavy shelling was reported on Tuesday in the rebel-held city of Donetsk and at the city’s airport, which remains under government control. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, during a visit to a NATO base in Poland on Tuesday, called the increase in violence “a fairly important uptick” in the conflict, adding that Russia had resupplied the rebels during a lull in the fighting over the holidays. In a statement, Ambassador Ertugrul Apakan of the special monitoring mission to Ukraine for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted that the situation had “significantly deteriorated” in the last 24 hours. “For a while, it was just light weapons,” Michael Bociurkiw, the spokesman for the monitoring mission, said by telephone from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. “But now we are back to the heavy artillery.” The worst fighting has continued at the Donetsk airport, where an almost constant barrage of fire could be heard throughout the city on Tuesday. Rebel forces have tried to dislodge the army from the airport since May, with few breaks in the fighting. A rebel leader, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, assailed Kiev for recent shelling attacks against Donetsk, telling journalists that Kiev was violating the cease-fire. “Donetsk is returning to the life it had before the preliminary negotiations on the cease-fire,” he said. On Tuesday, a control tower, one of the few features of the once-gleaming airport that had remained recognizable throughout the conflict, finally crumbled under a renewed rebel assault. Volleys of Grad rockets captured on a live stream camera lit up the evening sky as reports from artillery rumbled through the city. Above all, Tuesday’s fighting served as a reminder of the danger that a return to full-scale military conflict would pose to civilians. More than 4,800 people have died in the conflict since last April, many of them civilians, and according to some estimates, more than one million civilians have been displaced. Each side blamed the other for the attack at the Ukrainian-held checkpoint, which took place in a town called Volnovakha, some 30 miles southwest of Donetsk. Video uploaded to YouTube shortly after the shelling showed Ukrainian soldiers inspecting the crumpled bodies of the victims, many with open wounds, slumped inside a yellow minibus. A patch of snow by the bus was soaked with blood. Several yards away, the videographer discovered a bowling ball-size crater. Vyacheslav Abroskin, the chief of police for the Donetsk region, said that the bus had been hit by a Grad rocket launched from the direction of the village of Dokuchayevsk, which is under rebel control. The attack killed 10 and injured 13, he said. Earlier reports said that 11 people had been killed. “Having seen that with my own eyes, I can say that this was not done by people, but beasts with no principles, no morals, who must be destroyed,” Mr. Abroskin said. Denis Pushilin, a rebel leader, told Russian state news outlets that the rebels were not responsible for the attacks, and that they were most likely “a provocation,” meaning an attack used to frame the separatists. “Volnovakha and its outskirts are beyond the reach of our militia’s artillery,” he said. |