Heavy fighting erupts around Donetsk

 AFP journalists on the rooftop of a building duck for cover while reporting on heavy shelling between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian army in the vicinity of Donetsk’s International Airport.

AFP/Donetsk

Heavy fighting erupted around the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine yesterday, piling further pressure on a precarious nine-day-old truce between the government and separatist fighters.

Large clouds of thick black smoke billowed over the industrial city as the boom of sustained shelling and the rattle of automatic gunfire rang out, AFP reporters witnessed.

Kiev accused the rebels of jeopardising the truce by intensifying attacks on government positions in eastern Ukraine, the scene of five months of deadly combat.

Yesterday’s fighting appeared to be concentrated near Donetsk airport where the Ukrainian military said it had driven back a major assault by insurgent fighters on Friday.

“The terrorist actions are threatening the realisation of the Ukrainian president’s peace plan,” said National Security and Defence Council spokesman Volodymyr Polyovy.

He also took aim at comments by two rebel leaders who both signed the 12-point truce deal in Minsk on September 5, but who declared yesterday that they were mere “observers” at the talks.

The ceasefire deal has largely calmed a conflict that has cost more than 2,700 lives and set off the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War.

Rebels and government forces have since swapped dozens of captives under the accord, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has pledged to offer the eastern regions that form the economic backbone of Ukraine some limited self-rule.

But yesterday the insurgents accused Kiev’s forces of firing at them.

“From our side, nobody is shooting but they are breaking the rules, everybody in the world knows it,” said a rebel commander defending a checkpoint near the village of Olenivka south of Donetsk.

The simmering crisis has exposed layers of mistrust between both the West and Moscow and between the largely Russian-speaking populations in the east of Ukraine and the pro-Western leaders in Kiev.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk accused Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday of keeping Ukraine in a state of war to create a “frozen conflict” in Russia’s backyard.

“He wants to eliminate Ukraine as an independent country,” Yatseniuk said.

The West has been acting to isolate Putin, who is seen as less predictable and more aggressive than at any point since his domination of Russia began 15 years ago, and in turn pledged greater support for the government in Kiev.

Poroshenko heads to Washington this week to meet President Barack Obama, seeking to secure a “special status” alliance with the United States as he steers Ukraine further out of Russia’s orbit.

Obama has rejected direct military involvement but instead unveiled increasingly painful economic sanctions on Moscow that – together with similar EU measures – effectively lock Russia out of Western capital markets and hamstring its crucial oil industry.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Washington of “trying to use the crisis in Ukraine to break economic ties between the EU and Russia and force Europe to buy US gas at much higher prices”.

The punitive measures and an accompanying East-West trade war have left Russia’s economy facing an increasingly gloomy future and a possible recession this year but have seemingly failed to alter Putin’s monumental popularity.

The truce halted a rebel counter-surge across the southeast last month with the alleged support of Russian paratroopers and heavy weaponry that turned the tide of the war against Ukrainian forces.

Putin has repeatedly denied any direct involvement in the conflict, although Nato and Kiev say at least 1,000 Russian soldiers remain on Ukrainian soil.

Russia on Saturday sent a 220-truck convoy it said was carrying aid to the residents of rebel-held Luhansk, who have been struggling without water and power for weeks.

“I don’t know how, but somehow things will return to normal, it can’t be bad all the time,” said one resident Yulia as she carried a yellow plastic bag packed with basic supplies.

Ukraine – which did not give permission for the convoy to cross – had expressed fears the trucks may be carrying supplies for insurgents and bitterly protested a similar delivery last month.

On the domestic front, cracks emerged in Poroshenko’s administration when a deputy foreign minister quit over a delay in the implementation of an EU trade deal, apparently under Russian pressure.

The deal – part of a broader association agreement to be ratified tomorrow – was meant to revive Ukraine’s economy by lifting EU trade barriers, but Russia said it feared it would see its own market flooded with cheaper EU goods.

Main pro-Russia party says it will boycott next month’s parliamentary vote

The pro-Russian party that ruled Ukraine under ousted president Viktor Yanukovych said yesterday that it would boycott next month’s parliamentary polls and form an “opposition government” to fight for regional powers and against Kiev’s westward course.

The decision by the once-dominant Regions Party came as top politicians formed leadership lists for the October 26 election that was called early to regain people’s trust after two decades of post-Soviet corruption and economic malaise.

The polls have been an afterthought for many horrified Ukrainians watching their nation being ravaged by a pro-Russian eastern uprising that erupted in the wake of the toppling of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovych in February.

But the new 450-seat chamber will enjoy additional powers that could make its co-operation essential to President Petro Poroshenko’s attempts to pull Ukraine out of its worst security and economic crises since independence in 1991.

The Verkhovna Rada parliament will nominate prime ministers and have the right to sack top cabinet members without prior consultation with the president.

A new People’s Front created by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk and the president’s own Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc are expected to form the bedrock of the current leadership’s parliamentary support.

But the Regions Party – winner of the last election in December 2012 and long viewed as the domain of powerful tycoons with strong Russian connections – pulled out of the race before it even began.

The party said in a statement that it was forming an opposition government that will fight for “a real decentralisation of power – in other words, awarding each region control over its own budgets”.

Regions Party leader Borys Kolesnykov expressed exasperation at the idea of an election being held “when there is a war (and) when people are dying”.

The group had relied on the support of the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk – hotbeds of the current uprising where pro-Moscow rebels have declared their own “people’s republics”.

Poroshenko hopes that a September 5 ceasefire will calm tensions enough to let the two regions vote and enable his government to demonstrate the progress made in the first months of his rocky term.

The election will offer the public the first chance to pass judgment on the 48-year-old tycoon’s ability to steer the country closer to the West while avoiding Russian retaliation, which could entail a direct invasion or a possible economic blockade.

The president’s somewhat unimaginatively monikered Petro Poroshenko Bloc will be headed by former heavyweight boxing champ and new Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko – arguably Ukraine’s biggest sporting hero and most appealing member of a widely despised political establishment.

Yatseniuk will head a new People’s Front that also includes Interior Minister Arsen Avakov – a hate figure in the Kremlin – as well as parliament speaker and brief interim president Olksandr Turchynov.

But former pro-Western prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko decided not to head her own Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party after sticky corruption allegations saw her collect a humbling 13% in the May presidential election.

She will run in the number two slot behind the enigmatic Nadiya Savchenko – Ukraine’s only female aviator of a Su-24 bomber who is currently sitting in a Russian jail.

The 33-year-old Savchenko fought as a volunteer against the insurgents before being captured in June.