Ceasefire fears after shelling reported near Ukraine port
Witnesses in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol reported sustained explosions outside the city last night, and a volunteer battalion of Ukrainian fighters says Grad rockets were fired at its positions.
The claims came little more than a day after Ukraine and Russian-backed separatist rebels signed a ceasefire following more than four months of fighting in the country’s east.
The ceasefire had appeared to largely been holding during much of the day.
But late last night, witnesses in Mariupol told The Associated Press by telephone that heavy explosions were coming from the city’s eastern outskirts, where Ukrainian troops retain defensive lines against the rebels.
The volunteer Azov Battalion said on Facebook that their positions were hit by Grad rockets, but did not give details.
Mariupol is a port city of about half a million on the coast of the Sea of Azov. Rebels recently opened a new front on the coast, leading to fears the separatists were trying to secure a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in March.
Earlier yesterday, the presidents of Ukraine and Russia said the ceasefire was mostly holding, but the truce still appeared fragile as both sides of the conflict claimed violations.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed steps “for giving the ceasefire a stable character” in a telephone conversation.
But, it said, both leaders assessed the ceasefire as having been “fulfilled as a whole”.
A separate Kremlin statement about the call said: “There was a mutual satisfaction with the fact that the sides of the conflict were overall observing the ceasefire regime.”
Colonel Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s national security council, told reporters that rebels had fired at Ukrainian forces on 10 occasions on Friday night after the ceasefire took effect.
Meanwhile, the International Committee for the Red Cross said its workers had tried to deliver food aid to the city of Luhansk, which had endured weeks of heavy fighting, but turned back after shooting north-east of the city.
Ukraine, Russia and the Kremlin-backed separatists signed the ceasefire deal on Friday in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
The negotiators agreed on the withdrawal of all heavy weaponry, the release of all prisoners and the delivery of humanitarian aid to devastated cities in eastern Ukraine.
Fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian government troops has ravaged the already teetering Ukrainian economy, claimed at least 2,600 civilian lives and left hundreds of thousands homeless, according to United Nations estimates.
The country also faces escalated tensions between the Russian-speakers who predominate in the rebel east and the Ukrainian-speakers in the central and western reaches.
