Shelling near Donetsk airport undermines Ukraine ceasefire

PanARMENIAN.Net - There has been fresh shelling near Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine, raising fears that a recently agreed ceasefire may collapse, BBC News reports.

The truce held for much of Saturday, Sept 6 but shelling in Mariupol, which killed one woman, was followed by the Donetsk airport blasts early on Sunday. The two cities then turned quiet, with no reports of clashes overnight.

Fighting in the east has killed some 2,600 people since April. The truce and roadmap to peace were agreed on Friday.

On Sunday, Ukrainian security official Volodymyr Poliovyi said 864 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the conflict began.

Russia has repeatedly denied accusations by Ukraine and the West that it has been sending troops into Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions to help the militias, who want to establish an independent state.

Before the ceasefire was agreed in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday, the pro-Russian armed men had been advancing on both Donetsk airport and Mariupol, a key city on the route to Crimea.

The presidents of Ukraine and Russia both said on Saturday that the truce was largely holding. However, late on Saturday, eyewitnesses said pro-Russian armed groups had shelled and destroyed a government checkpoint on the eastern approaches to Mariupol - a major port on the Azov Sea.

Local officials said one 33-year-old woman civilian was killed and three people injured in the shelling. One Ukrainian soldier told Reuters that government forces had pulled out tanks in line with the truce.

He said: "We only left lightly armed people to man checkpoints and these monsters violated every word of the agreement."

Separately, a new report by Amnesty International accuses all sides in the conflict of committing war crimes. The human rights group said civilians had accused Ukrainian government troops of shelling their neighborhoods indiscriminately.