Pro-Russian separatists renewed attacks on Ukrainian forces
at an airport complex in the east on Monday after Kiev launched a mass
operation to reclaim lost ground there that Russia called a "strategic
mistake".
Ukrainian officials said three soldiers had been killed and
66 wounded over the past 24 hours, during which they said they had returned
battle lines at the airport outside Donetsk to the status quo under a much
violated international peace plan.
Russia expressed concern at what it called escalation by
Kiev and published its own peace plan on Monday in the form of a letter from
President Vladimir Putin to Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, which it said
Poroshenko had rejected.
"It's the biggest, even strategic mistake of the
Ukrainian authorities to bank on a military solution to the crisis,"
Interfax quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin as saying. "This
may lead to irreversible consequences for Ukrainian statehood."
In Kiev, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said
Ukrainian intelligence had confirmed Russian cross-border arms deliveries to
the separatists were continuing.
"Tanks, howitzers, Grad systems, Smerch, Buk,"
Yatseniuk told a joint news conference with Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz,
listing Russian-made missile systems which he said were being channelled to the
separatists.
"Radio-electronic surveillance stations are not on sale
in the Donetsk market - they are only to be had from the Russian defence
ministry and Russian military intelligence," he said.
In Kharkiv, a big eastern city well away from the conflict zone, an explosive
device went off near a court house, injuring at least 14 people in the latest
of a series of mysterious explosions in the city, police said.
Markiyan Lubkivsky, an adviser for the state security
service SBU, said on his Facebook page the incident was being treated as a
"terrorist act".
Ukrainian officials have insisted Moscow sticks to the
12-point peace plan agreed in Minsk in September, which they say was not
violated by its airport counter-offensive, launched after troops had appeared
to be pinned down inside the complex.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said the
situation was still very tense around the airport, which has symbolic value for
both sides, and separatists continued attacks on government forces there and
elsewhere in the east.
Since plans for another round of peace talks last week were
abandoned, fighting has flared up again in Ukraine, whose Crimean peninsula was
annexed by Russia in March last year, prompting a crisis with the West, which
has imposed sanctions.
The World Health Organisation says more than 4,800 people
have been killed in the conflict.
SANCTIONS TO STAY
In Brussels, European Union foreign
ministers said now was not the time to ease the economic sanctions against
Russia despite conciliatory proposals from the EU's foreign policy chief
Federica Mogherini.
"In light of the current events in eastern Ukraine, no
one had the idea of loosening the sanctions," German Foreign Minister
Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters after talks among EU ministers.
Apart from calling for a ceasefire, the Minsk agreement called
for the withdrawal of armed groups and foreign fighters as well as military
equipment - meaning, for Kiev, weapons and rocket systems which it says Moscow
is supplying to the rebels.
Despite what Kiev and the West says is incontrovertible
proof, Russia denies its troops are involved or that it is funnelling military
equipment to the separatists.
Putin's letter called for urgent moves to withdraw
large-calibre weapons from the conflict zone. "This is now an absolute
priority," said a Russian Foreign Ministry statement.
Ukraine's Foreign Ministry hit back, calling for Moscow to
show its readiness to comply with the Minsk agreement by signing a timetable
for implementing its main points.
"It is very important that a concrete plan is signed
for fulfilling all, without exception, the points of the Minsk agreements, and
not just those that Russia or the terrorists like," Foreign Ministry
spokesman Evhen Perebynis said on TV channel 112.
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