Rebels kill 23 Ukraine troops, shredding hopes for truce
12 July 2014 11:27 PM GMT
Ukraine’s military on Friday reported losing 23 servicemen in clashes across the separatist east that threatened to shatter slim Western hopes of a truce in Europe’s deadliest conflict in decades. The defence ministry said the toll included 19 troops who died in a hail of rockets fired from a truck-mounted Grad rocket launcher system -- a type of weapon both Kiev and Washington insist could only have been covertly supplied to the rebels by Russia. The official spokesman of Ukraine’s intensifying eastern assault added that 93 servicemen had sustained ‘wounds and contusions of varying severity’.
‘The rebels will pay for the life of every one of our servicemen with tens and hundred of their own,’ Ukraine’s Western-backed President Petro Poroshenko told an emergency security meeting.
Friday’s official death toll is the highest since Poroshenko tore up a brief ceasefire with the rebels on 1 July and relaunched an offensive that managed to dislodge the militias from key eastern strongholds they had held since early April. The military separately claimed ‘eliminating’ nearly 100 fighters in one of Ukraine’s bloodiest days since the start of the crisis last November as anti-government protests spiralled into revolution and a protracted standoff with pro-Russian rebels.
The tide in the eastern uprising turned last weekend when resurgent government forces managed to flush out the separatists from a string of eastern towns and cities that hold historic Russian ties.
Most of the militias have since retreated to Donetsk and the neighbouring industrial city of Lugansk -- both capitals of their own ‘People’s Republic’ that refuse to recognise Kiev’s new West-leaning government and are seeking annexation by Russia. The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 500 people and displaced tens of thousands across a rustbelt that had long been the economic engine of the troubled post-Soviet state.
Amnesty International said on Friday it had recorded ‘hundreds’ of abductions and acts of torture committed by the separatists during the uprising. But it also noted that ‘excessive force may have been used... by Ukrainian forces’ on several occasions -- a charge repeatedly made by Moscow.
‘The rebels will pay for the life of every one of our servicemen with tens and hundred of their own,’ Ukraine’s Western-backed President Petro Poroshenko told an emergency security meeting.
Friday’s official death toll is the highest since Poroshenko tore up a brief ceasefire with the rebels on 1 July and relaunched an offensive that managed to dislodge the militias from key eastern strongholds they had held since early April. The military separately claimed ‘eliminating’ nearly 100 fighters in one of Ukraine’s bloodiest days since the start of the crisis last November as anti-government protests spiralled into revolution and a protracted standoff with pro-Russian rebels.
The tide in the eastern uprising turned last weekend when resurgent government forces managed to flush out the separatists from a string of eastern towns and cities that hold historic Russian ties.
Most of the militias have since retreated to Donetsk and the neighbouring industrial city of Lugansk -- both capitals of their own ‘People’s Republic’ that refuse to recognise Kiev’s new West-leaning government and are seeking annexation by Russia. The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 500 people and displaced tens of thousands across a rustbelt that had long been the economic engine of the troubled post-Soviet state.
Amnesty International said on Friday it had recorded ‘hundreds’ of abductions and acts of torture committed by the separatists during the uprising. But it also noted that ‘excessive force may have been used... by Ukrainian forces’ on several occasions -- a charge repeatedly made by Moscow.
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