Ukraine truce deal in doubt
The shaky truce between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military was challenged yesterday when 12 soldiers and civilians were reported killed in a surge of fighting across the separatist east.
A week after talks in the Belarussian capital Minsk yielded an agreement for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons and troops from the frontline, a lasting solution to the conflict which has killed more than 3,200 people seemed no closer.
National Security and Defence Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko said rebels had killed nine soldiers over the last 24 hours. Some died in a rebel attack on an armoured vehicle carrying Ukrainian paratroopers.
Three civilians were killed in the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk, according to city hall.
The European-brokered deal finalised a week ago in Minsk commits the Ukrainian army and the rebels to stop firing and establish a 30-kilometre buffer zone between the warring sides.
However, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko stressed that the army would continue fighting if the insurgents failed to silence their guns.
In a highly symbolic act, activists in Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv, an eastern hub of 1.5 million which avoided the conflict after an initial outbreak of unrest, toppled the country's largest statue of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in the main square.
Kharkiv, which lies city close to the Russian border, is considered by Moscow as culturally Russian and President Vladimir Putin declared it part of "Novorossiya" (New Russia), which according to him became part of Ukraine artificially in the early 20th century.
Statues of Lenin, seen as symbols of the totalitarian Soviet past, were toppled throughout central Ukraine, including Kiev, during last winter's pro-Europe protests, which led to the ouster of the unpopular former president Viktor Yanukovych.
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