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Business News/ News / World/  Unrest grows in Ukraine before presidential polls
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Unrest grows in Ukraine before presidential polls

An attack by rebels near Volnovakha, south of Donetsk, left 16 servicemen dead

Unidentified attackers blew up a railway line in the same region used for local trains late Thursday. Photo: AFPPremium
Unidentified attackers blew up a railway line in the same region used for local trains late Thursday. Photo: AFP

Violence in eastern Ukraine cast a shadow on this weekend’s presidential election, as government forces suffered their worst losses in battles with pro-Russian separatists since the secession campaign began in March.

An attack by rebels near Volnovakha, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Donetsk, left 16 servicemen dead, first deputy health minister Ruslan Salyutin said in televised remarks on Thursday. One soldier was killed and two injured in the Luhansk region, the Defense Ministry said.

A pro-government force in Donetsk, the Battalion Donbas, was ambushed on Friday near the village of Karlivka by separatists, Semen Semenchenko, the head of the battalion, wrote on his Facebook page. Nine soldiers, who were wounded by gunfire, grenades and snipers, have been taken to a hospital, he said, adding that fighting is still going on.

Unidentified attackers blew up a railway line in the same region used for local trains late Thursday, the Donetsk state-run railway company says on its website.

The armed separatists who are continuing to terrorize the people of Luhansk and Donetsk must not be allowed to deny Ukrainians their right to vote, UK foreign secretary William Hague said in a statement. We call on the Ukrainian government to continue its policy of restraint.

‘Very difficult’

The conflict is taking a deadly turn after President Vladimir Putin said he’s easing the way for Ukraine’s 25 May election by pulling back Russian troops. The government in Kiev accused its eastern neighbour of seeking to destabilize the country before the ballot as Russia’s foreign ministry said holding the vote during a conflict will be very difficult.

Russian stocks rose, with the Micex Index adding 0.2% 1,432.99 and heading for a fourth consecutive week of growth. The ruble rose 0.1% against the dollar, extending its gain since Putin’s incursion into Crimea started on 1 March to 4.6%.

There’s a brutal war under way against our country, acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said on parliament’s website. Ukraine will never return to a post- Soviet neo-empire, which the Russian government dreams about.

A bluff’

Putin has made promises before to remove troops from along Ukraine’s border that went unfulfilled. Russia’s pledges on pulling back troops are a bluff, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in a statement.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) puts the number of Russian troops on the frontier at 40,000.

“We’ve only seen a small movement of forces," US Air Force general Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday after two-day meeting of allied military chiefs. “The force that remains behind on the Ukrainian border right now is able to do exactly what it could do a week ago or two weeks ago. So nothing has changed."

Russia warned that it would have to take measures to respond to NATO drills and troop deployments.

“The operational and combat readiness of the alliance’s forces is intensifying on Russia’s borders," Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian military’s general staff, told a conference in Moscow on Friday. In these conditions, we can’t stay on the sidelines of what is happening. We will have to take measures in response.

Security Council

Yatsenyuk called for a United Nations Security Council session on the situation. The UN said this week that 127 people have died from violence in the country’s eastern and southern regions.

Ukraine’s government says the Kremlin is aiding separatist rebels in the east.

Several groups of armed militants escorting weapons and ammunition from Russia were prevented from illegally crossing the frontier by Ukrainian border guards, the foreign ministry in Kiev said in a statement on Thursday. Russia is choosing tactics to further aggravate the situation, it said.

Russia isn’t necessarily fully orchestrating the separatists—but it’s not putting enough pressure on them to stop, Joerg Forbrig, senior program officer for central and eastern Europe at the Berlin bureau of the German Marshall Fund of the US, said over phone. The violence may be part of the next wave of Russian operations, or it may be proof that Russia doesn’t control the rebels.

Election difficulties

The Ukrainian authorities have said difficulties in conducting this weekend’s presidential election in mostly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine won’t undermine its legitimacy. Chancellor Angela Merkel has told German lawmakers she expects Russia to accept the result, two officials said.

The situation is very difficult, Serhiy Tkachenko, leader of the Ukrainian Voters Committee, a non-governmental organization, said in a statement. In the Donetsk region only about 25% of the polling stations are ready for the elections.

More than 50% of polling stations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions haven’t received preliminary voter registration lists yet, Andriy Mahera, first deputy chief of Ukraine’s Central Voting Commission, said on Thursday.

The US and its allies will do all they can to ensure that the vote can proceed unimpeded, and more than 1,000 election observers are on the ground in Ukraine, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington on Thursday, adding that the vast majority of the country remains calm. Bloomberg

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Published: 23 May 2014, 05:16 PM IST
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