Ukraine's military yesterday 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.
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. The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 500 people so far and displaced tens of thousands.