DONETSK, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian armed forces mounted a
major onslaught against pro-Russian separatist fighters Sunday in an
attempt to gain control over the area where a Malaysia Airlines plane
was downed earlier this month.
The U.S. State Department,
meanwhile, released satellite images that it says back up its claims
that rockets have been fired from Russia into eastern Ukraine and heavy
artillery for separatists has also crossed the border.
A four-page
document released by the State Department seems to show blast marks
from where rockets were launched and craters where they landed.
Officials said the images, sourced from the U.S. Director of National
Intelligence, show heavy weapons fired between July 21 and July 26 —
after the July 17 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
Moscow
has angrily denied allegations of Russia’s involvement in eastern
Ukraine. Russia’s foreign ministry over the weekend accused the U.S. of
conducting "an unrelenting campaign of slander against Russia, ever more
relying on open lies."
Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by
phone Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, urging him to
stop the flow of heavy weapons and rocket and artillery fire from Russia
into Ukraine, said a State Department official. Kerry did not accept
Lavrov’s denial that heavy weapons from Russia were contributing to the
conflict, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to
provide details of the call.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
Reports
of the intensifying unrest in eastern Ukraine prompted a postponement
of a trip to the site by a team of Dutch and Australian police officers
who had planned to start searching for evidence and the remaining
bodies.
In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his
government has rejected the idea of deploying armed troops to secure the
crash site because there is no way they could achieve "military
superiority" in a region where heavily armed pro-Russian rebels are
battling Ukrainian government forces.
"The option we looked at was
a military option in which you could secure the area so you can work in
a stable environment," Rutte said. But "that the option would be such a
provocation to the separatists that it could destabilize the
situation."
Ukraine’s National Security Council said Sunday that
government troops have encircled Horlivka, a key rebel stronghold, and
that there had been fighting in other cities in the east. Horlivka lies
around 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of the main rebel-held city of
Donetsk.
The armed forces "have increased assaults on territory
held by pro-Russian mercenaries, destroyed checkpoints and positions and
moved very close to Horlivka," the council said in a statement.
A
representative of the separatist military command in Donetsk confirmed
that there had been fighting in Horlivka, but said that rebel fighters
were holding their positions.
Elsewhere, Russian state news agency
RIA Novosti reported Sunday that a column of Ukrainian armored
personnel carriers, trucks and tanks had entered the town of Shakhtarsk,
10 miles (15 kilometers) west of the site of the Boeing 777 crash.
Shakhtarsk is a strategic town in the area. By controlling the town, the Ukrainian army would cut off
vital rebel supply lines.
Local
media reported fighting also taking place in the towns of Snizhne and
Torez, the two nearest mid-sized towns to the crash site.
The
government accused rebel forces of firing rockets Sunday on residential
apartment blocks in Horlivka in what they said was an attempt to
discredit the army and whip up anti-government sentiment. The separatist
self-declared "Donetsk People’s Republic" has accused the army of being
responsible for that and other rocket attacks in nearby cities.
The
Donetsk regional government — which is loyal to Kiev and based
elsewhere since rebels took over the area — said Sunday in a statement
that at least 13 people, including two children aged 1 and 5, were
killed in fighting in Horlivka. It said another five people were killed
as a result of clashes in a suburb north of Donetsk.
New
York-based Human Rights Watch last week condemned what it said was the
Ukrainian government forces’ practice of using unguided rockets in
populated urban areas. It said that use of the rockets was a violation
of international humanitarian law that "may amount to war crimes."
Malaysian
Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile over a
part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists on July
17, killing all 298 people on board. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say it
was shot down by a missile from rebel territory, most likely by
mistake.
Ten days after the disaster, a full-fledged investigation
still has not begun at the crash site, with some bodies still
unrecovered and the site forensically compromised. Concerns about the
integrity of the site were raised further when the parents of a young
woman who died in the disaster that had flown from their home in Perth,
Australia, visited the site Saturday outside the village of Hrabove and
even sat on part of the plane’s wreckage.
It remained unclear when the forensic experts from the Netherlands and Australia would be able to begin
their work at the site.
Alexander
Hug, the deputy head of a monitoring team from the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it was too dangerous for the
unarmed officers to travel there from their current location in Donetsk.
"We
reassess the situation continuously and we will start to redeploy
tomorrow morning back to the site if the situation changes," Hug said.
Australian
Prime Minister Tony Abbott had said earlier Sunday that unarmed
Australian police would be part of the Dutch-led police force to secure
the area and help recover victims’ remains.
Abbott said that by
using unarmed police, Ukraine’s parliament won’t need to ratify the
deployment as it would if the security force were to be armed.
"This
is a risky mission. There’s no doubt about that," Abbott told
reporters. "But all the professional advice that I have is that the
safest way to conduct it is unarmed, as part of a police-led
humanitarian mission," he said.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib
Razak said in a statement that his country would send dozens of police
and that his country had received assurances from pro-Russia separatists
that they would provide protection for investigators.
Flights
from Ukraine to the Netherlands have taken 227 coffins containing
victims of the plane disaster. Officials say the exact number of people
held in the coffins still needs to be determined by forensic experts in
the Netherlands.
The Malaysia Airlines disaster prompted some
expectations in the West that Russia would scale back its involvement in
the uprising in Ukraine’s east, but the opposite seems to be the case.
In
addition to producing evidence that rockets have been fired into
Ukraine from Russia, the U.S. has said it has seen powerful rocket
systems moving closer to the border.
Separately, the New York
Times reported Sunday that U.S. defense and intelligence officials were
working on a plan that would enable the Obama administration to give
Ukraine specific locations of surface-to-air missiles controlled by
Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The plan, if implemented,
would allow the Ukraine government to target these missile sites for
destruction, the newspaper said.
Citing U.S. sources, the Times
said it was unclear if President Barack Obama would want to give Ukraine
the more precise information about military targets because it would
amount to America getting more involved in the conflict.
In
Warsaw, Poland, about 250 people marched through the city to protest
what they called the "terror" imposed by Russian President Vladimir
Putin in Ukraine. Some of the demonstrators carried Ukrainian flags, and
there were banners that proclaimed "Putin is a Sponsor of Terror" and
"Europe, Stop Just Talking. Start Taking Action! Stop Terror in
Ukraine."
_________________
Leonard reported from Kiev;
Associated Press writers Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow, Mike Corder in
The Hague, Netherlands, and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw contributed to this
report.
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