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Fighting continues in Ukraine despite looming cease-fire | Fighting continues in Ukraine despite looming cease-fire |
(about 5 hours later) | |
MOSCOW — Fighting raged in eastern Ukraine ahead of a planned cease-fire, amid increasing doubts over the workability of a day-old peace deal. | |
The battle between Russian-backed rebels and Ukrainian government forces appeared to be intensifying before a cease-fire set to go into effect at 12 a.m. Sunday, as both sides battled for position. At least 28 people were reported killed since Thursday. | |
The violence came as leaders traded starkly different interpretations about what had been agreed to during the marathon negotiations in Minsk, Belarus , raising questions about how long any truce would last. Among the issues were the status of the front line, the freedom of a politically important Ukrainian soldier in Russian custody and a promised Ukrainian amnesty for the rebels. | |
The deal had been seen as a last chance to avoid an even broader confrontation between the rebels and Ukrainian forces. Fighting had spiked since mid-January, sweeping away the remnants of a previous peace agreement and claiming hundreds more lives in a conflict that has become Europe’s bloodiest since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. | |
But with such major disagreements, leaders warned that even if the cease-fire goes into effect at all, the deal reached after 15-hour talks in the Belarusian capital may soon break down. | |
“Nobody has a firm confidence that the Minsk agreements will be observed,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Friday at a speech in the training center of the Ukrainian National Guard. “We are still far from peace, but we hope that it is a way toward de-escalation.” | |
At least 5,400 people have been killed in the 10-month-old conflict, according to U.N. estimates. More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes. | |
Key questions were left unresolved in the 13-point peace deal, including the status of the vital Ukrainian-held railway hub of Debaltseve, where pro-Russian rebels have nearly surrounded up to 8,000 Ukrainian troops. Intense battles were taking place there on Friday, both sides reported, as they attempted to establish new facts on the ground before their weapons were to fall silent on Sunday. | |
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the United States issued a joint statement Friday, saying they remain concerned about the situation in Ukraine, in particular in view of the fighting around Debaltseve. “We urge all sides to adhere strictly to the provisions of the Package and to carry out its measures without delay,” starting with the cease-fire Sunday, the statement said. | |
Even aspects of the deal that appeared relatively clear fell into dispute Friday. | |
On Thursday, Poroshenko jubilantly declared that a female Ukrainian helicopter navigator held by Russia would soon be freed under a plan to release all prisoners of war. Nadiya Savchenko has become a folk hero in Ukraine. But a Kremlin spokesman cast cold water on that idea on Friday, saying that Savchenko was still under investigation. | |
“She is not an illegally held person, she is not a POW, she is not a hostage. She is under investigation in strict accordance with current legislation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies. Separately, a top judicial official said that courts had no plan to release her. | |
And though Kiev agreed in the deal to issue an amnesty to those who took part in pro-rebel actions, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told parliament on Friday that the pardon would not extend to rebel leaders because of a September law excluding those who had committed “grave crimes.” | |
Rebels said that was a sign that the Ukrainian government was already backing away from the deal. | |
“We will only be ready for unconditional compliance with the Minsk accords if Kiev complies with them too, if no one shoots us,” rebel spokesman Eduard Basurin told the Interfax news service. He said seven civilians had been killed in rebel-held territory in the previous day. | |
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said that 11 soldiers had been killed and 40 wounded in fighting in the previous day. He also said that pro-Russian forces had stepped up their use of drones for battlefield surveillance and that they appeared to be targeting infrastructure before the cease-fire requires heavy weaponry to pull back. | |
A pro-Kiev militia also said that a tank battle was underway east of the Ukrainian-held port city of Mariupol, where they had tried to gain ground from rebel fighters in recent days. | |
Separately, at least 10 civilians were killed on the Ukrainian side of the fighting, regional authorities said, including a child and an adult in the government-held city of Artemivsk. The city has been relatively free of fighting for months, and it has been a triage site for wounded soldiers and evacuees from the besieged town of Debaltseve about 30 miles away. It was not immediately clear who was responsible. | |