Putin calls on Ukraine to end 'punitive' operation as rebel says at least 30 fighters' bodies have been delivered to hospital
Shaun Walker in Donetsk
theguardian.com, Wednesday 28 May 2014 04.53 AEST
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Rebels moved to seize Donetsk airport on Monday and were repelled by government forces. Photograph: Vadim Ghirda/AP
Separatists in east Ukraine counted dozens of losses on Tuesday as the deadly toll of fierce clashes with Ukrainian government forces became clear.
Representatives of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic said that they had lost around 50 fighters in Monday's fight for control of Donetsk airport, while the Kiev-appointed mayor of Donetsk, Oleksandr Lukyanchenko, said that there were around 40 dead, including two civilians. He claimed that many of the dead were Russian citizens.
At one central morgue a police investigator said he had seen a list of 33 dead, while doctors claimed there were 43 fighters from the Donetsk People's Republic and one civilian. During the day new bodies arrived, many of them in a disfigured state or missing limbs, evidence of the heavy weaponry that the Ukrainian army had used on the rebels. One body was without a head.
Most of the casualties were from Monday's fighting around Donetsk airport, though some may also have died when trucks carrying injured fighters were hit as they drove back to Donetsk.
A Ukrainian official said on Tuesday that Kiev was now appraised of all separatist positions in the city, and would attack them using "special high-precision weapons" if the separatists did not surrender. The government has intensified the "anti-terrorism operation" in the east since the victory of businessman Petro Poroshenko in presidential elections on Sunday.
Poroshenko, who in early June will formally take over from the interim government which has been in place since former president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Ukraine three months ago, has already said the operation should last not weeks or months, but be over "in a matter of hours". Russia has said it is open for dialogue with Poroshenko but has repeatedly called for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the east.
The rebels are still in control of a number of government buildings in Donetsk and other cities in the region, which have been occupied for more than a month, and in much of the region the police have either remained neutral or gone over to the separatists. However, the airport appeared to be a red line for the Ukrainian authorities, and when a group of around 200 fighters attempted to seize it in the early hours of Monday morning they met with serious resistance, including air strikes.
"The airport is completely under control," Arsen Avakov, the interior minister, told journalists in Kiev on Tuesday. "The adversary suffered heavy losses. We have no losses."
There was sporadic gunfire in the deserted streets around the airport, and the occasional rumble of fighter jets patrolling the skies.
Outside one Donetsk hospital on Tuesday morning, a group of men were patrolling who appeared to be from Russia's North Caucasus, possibly Chechens. They refused to talk and demanded that journalists leave. Ukrainian media have widely reporting that "Kadyrovtsy" – the feared forces loyal to Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov – are involved in the fighting. There have indeed been many sightings of fighters from the North Caucasus present in the region, but it is unclear whether they are volunteers or semi-official battalions sent by the Kremlin or its proxies in the region.
Separately, the Ukrainian border service said it had engaged in a fire-fight with a minibus carrying weapons that had tried to cross from Russia in the early hours of Tuesday morning, seizing a consignment of weapons and injuring one man. It also said there was a column of 40 trucks accompanied by armed men that was waiting on the other side of the border, and would possibly attempt to cross to Ukraine.
Whatever help Russia may be informally offering the rebels in eastern Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has made it clear the territory is not likely to be annexed in the same way as the Crimea. Russia did not recognise the independence referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, unlike a similar referendum in Crimea, and has ignored repeated appeals by the local leaders to send in the army. Indeed, there is a gradual but continuing withdrawal of the regular Russian army from the border, where it has been concentrated in recent weeks.
The realisation that Russia is unlikely to come to the rescue has led to a fractious atmosphere among the separatists and differing views on how best to proceed.
At a tempestuous session of the self-proclaimed supreme council of the Donetsk People's Republic on Tuesday afternoon, there was shouting and arguing about the best way forward, and the divisions between different strands of the movement were apparent. Several leaders arrived with a coterie of armed bodyguards, and the session began with a minute of silence for those rebels killed on Monday.
"We need to keep hold of our emotions," the self-styled people's governor of the region, Pavel Gubarev, told a wailing woman at the sidelines of the meeting. "This is a war. Emotions will only harm us, unless they are targeted at attaining victory."
On the agenda was the setting up of "people's control" militias to protect against looting and petty crime. This came after an apparent order signed by Igor Strelkov, the Russian citizen commanding rebel forces in the besieged town of Slavyansk, announcing that two of his commanders had been sentenced to death for looting on the basis of a 1941 Soviet wartime decree. The document, which could not be verified but was carried by a Russian news agency known to have access to Strelkov, said the sentence had already been carried out.
"As well as targeting the external enemy we must flush out the enemy within," said Ivan Novakovsky, an MP of the rebel parliament from the town of Makeyevka. He said he supported the idea of the death penalty for those guilty of "serious crimes" and said that he wanted the police and "people's control" militias to patrol cities together, with "field courts" which could issue verdicts.
The centre of Donetsk was quiet on Tuesday evening, as residents heeded warnings to stay home, with many shops and restaurants closed. During the afternoon, fighters had been building barricades on the main road from the airport to the city, fearful that the Ukrainian army could come from the airport to make a decisive move against the occupied buildings in the city centre. Fighters with automatic weapons and rocket grenade launchers manned the barricade.
The international observers group, the OSCE, said it had lost contact with a four-person monitoring team in the city on Monday evening which had not been heard from since.
"The team was on a routine patrol east of Donetsk when contact was lost. We have been unable to re-establish communication until now," said the OSCE. The organisation said it had been in touch with both Ukrainian and separatist authorities about the team, which consisted of an Estonian, a Swiss, a Turk and a Dane. In Copenhagen the Danish minister for trade and development, Mogens Jensen, said he believed the four had been detained by armed separatists.
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