New attempt to enforce Ukraine ceasefire
The four condemned the ceasefire breaches of recent days and agreed that the package of measures agreed on 12 February in the Belarus capital, Minsk, should be implemented “strictly and in their entirety”.
“OSCE [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] representatives should meet the parties on the ground to quickly implement these measures,” a French statement on the call said, adding that foreign ministers from the four powers would discuss details of the plan later on Thursday.
During the phone call, Ukraine’s president said the rebel seizure of the strategic town of Debaltseve had been contrary to the ceasefire agreement.
Petro Poroshenko told the other leaders “not to pretend that what happened in Debaltseve was in line with the Minsk agreements”, according to his website.
The telephone conversation followed criticism by Moscow and pro-Russia rebels of a call by Poroshenko for international peacekeepers to enforce the ceasefire in the east of the country.
Poroshenko won approval late on Wednesday from Ukraine’s national security and defence council to invite UN-mandated peacekeepers into the country to monitor the frontline.
“We see the best format would be a police mission from the European Union,” he said. The decision has yet to be approved by Ukraine’s parliament.
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, quickly responded by saying Poroshenko’s move “raises suspicions that he wants to destroy the Minsk accords”.
The co-leader of the rebel’s self-styled Donetsk republic, Denis Pushilin, flatly told the Interfax news agency that the appeal “is a violation … of the Minsk agreements”.
Fourteen Ukrainian servicemen have been killed and 173 wounded in the past 24 hours in fighting with pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, a Kiev military source told Reuters on Thursday.
Local military in Mariupol said separatists had launched mortar attacks on government-held positions on Thursday morning and are building up their forces there.
“Right now there are mortar attacks on Shyrokine,” a spokesman told Reuters, referring to a village about 19 miles east of Mariupol, along the coast of the Sea of Azov.Ukraine pulled thousands of troops out of the encircled railway junction of Debaltseve on Wednesday after a sustained rebel assault.Weary soldiers who made it to Artemivsk, near the main Ukrainian lines, described leaving behind carnage and destruction in Debaltseve.
“There’s no city left, it’s destroyed,” said a soldier with the call sign Sailor. “Two hours after the ceasefire, awful things started ... Residents are in basements. Lots of bodies haven’t been picked up because the separatists are shooting.”
“It was a madhouse. It was Chechnya,” said another named Igor Nekrasov.
The British defence secretary, Michael Fallon, warned that Vladimir Putin could repeat the tactics used to destabilise Ukraine in Baltic members of the Nato alliance.
He said Nato must be ready for Russian aggression in “whatever form it takes” as he acknowledged tensions between the alliance and Moscow were “warming up”.
His comments came after the British prime minister, David Cameron, called on Europe to make clear to Russia that it faced economic and financial consequences for “many years to come” if it did not stop destabilising Ukraine.
Fallon said the Russian leader could attempt a repeat of the covert campaign used in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine against other former Soviet bloc countries such as Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia.
That could involve irregular troops, cyber-attacks and inflaming tensions with ethnic Russian minorities in nations Moscow sees as part of the country’s “near abroad”.
He said there was a “real and present danger” that such tactics could be used.
Britain also said on Thursday that it had scrambled Typhoon fighter jets to see off two Russian long-range Bear bombers from the south coast of England. The incident, which took place on Wednesday, was the second of its kind in as many months.
Wednesday’s retreat by Ukrainian forces from Debaltseve – which holds a highway crossing and a rail junction connecting Donetsk and Luhansk – marked a major strategic victory for the breakaway “people’s republics” based in those two cities.
Poroshenko said he had ordered a “planned and organised retreat” from the strategically important rail hub after the opposing side had denied access to European observers, but the withdrawal seemed anything but orderly.
Speaking in the government-controlled village of Luhanske, Yuriy Prekharia, a first lieutenant, said the decision to pull back had been made by the senior commanders on the ground when they saw that the situation was becoming catastrophic.
“We knew that if we stayed there it would be definitely either be captivity or death,” he told the Guardian.