KIEV: Kiev’s pro-Western leaders and mediators hoped to reach a “binding” truce with pro-Russian separatists Saturday despite Ukraine suffering one of its bloodiest days yet in the nine-month conflict with 15 troops killed.
“In the last day, 15 soldiers died and 30 more were wounded. That is the figure for the whole front line,” Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak told journalists.
The death toll is the highest one-day loss for Ukraine’s military since the signing in September of a nominal ceasefire deal that has collapsed totally in recent weeks.
Representatives from both sides, as well as mediators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, were to meet in the Belarussian capital Minsk on Saturday for urgent Kremlin-backed talks to agree a new truce.
With the civilian death toll also mounting in rebel regions Donetsk and Lugansk, the truce in addition should provide for the “unrestricted supply of basic goods and humanitarian assistance”, the OSCE said.
Separatist negotiators flew into Minsk on Saturday, as did Kiev’s envoy, former president Leonid Kuchma, for the latest talks aimed at defusing fighting that has left at least 5,100 people dead.
Ukraine has insisted on the presence of Donetsk insurgency commander Alexander Zakharchenko and leader of the separatist Lugansk region Igor Plotnitsky at the talks, rather than their representatives.
The insurgents last week pulled out of peace talks and announced the start of an offensive designed to expand their control over a much broader swathe of the industrial southeast.
They said Friday they would push their offensive “until the entire Donetsk and Lugansk regions are freed” of Ukrainian troops should the talks fail.
At least 24 people were killed in fighting on Friday, with Grad rocket attacks on the separatists’ self-proclaimed capital Donetsk continuing late into the night, an AFP correspondent said.
Fighting is raging around the strategic Ukrainian-controlled transport hub of Debaltseve, some 50 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
The town of 25,000 people was built around a railroad connecting the two rebel centres of the Russian-speaking southeast.
Defence Minister Poltorak for the first time said that separatist forces had taken “partial” control of Debaltseve, where rebels claim to have surrounded some 8,000 Ukrainian troops.
The rebels on Friday said that they had taken the town of Vuglegirsk — some 10 kilometres from Debaltseve — although Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said fighting there was ongoing.
Both towns are without water, electricity or heating, said regional police chief Vyacheslav Abroskin.
The latest violence has alarmed Ukraine’s Western allies, with US Secretary of State John Kerry announcing plans to express his support for the war-torn nation during talks in Kiev on Thursday with President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Kerry will then meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, the State Department said.
Western governments and Ukraine accuse Russia of arming and training the rebels, who are deploying extensive weaponry including tanks and multiple rocket launchers. Russia denies claims it has sent regular troops and arms to bolster the rebels, who claim to get all their weaponry from captured Ukrainian supplies.
The 28-nation EU on Thursday extended through September a first wave of targeted sanctions it had slapped on Moscow and Crimean leaders in the wake of Russia’s March seizure of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine.
Russia accuses the West of manipulating the Ukrainian government, which came to power in elections after the ouster in huge street demonstrations last year of a Kremlin-backed leader.
