A passenger bus came under heavy fire in eastern Ukraine, killing 12 people, Ukrainian authorities said, and fighting intensified around the international airport in the city of Donetsk as separatists tried to oust government forces.
The latest violence flared on Tuesday after Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany scrapped plans for a summit in Kazakhstan this week because of a failure to implement a four-month-old ceasefire agreement.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko condemned the bus attack as an act that “chilled the heart,” blaming it on the forces of the separatist Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR) regions.
Photo: AFP - ANTI-TERRORIST OPERATION PRESS SERVICE
“These deaths are on the conscience of the DNR and LNR gangs, and on those who stand behind them,” he said, promising to sign a decree sending more troops to the front.
His comments aroused indignation yesterday among some Ukrainians seeking tougher action against the separatists.
“The terrorists fire on a bus with pensioners, kill children, shoot volunteers and torture them in cellars, and we say simply that we are ‘ready,’” Oksana Zinovieva, a spokeswoman for Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitshchko, wrote on Facebook.
“We have been trying to convert readiness into action for too long already,” she wrote.
The death toll in the attack rose to 12 with the death overnight of one of those wounded, police said.
Photographs showed the bus peppered with holes, as were seats inside it. A long trail of blood marked the road beside the vehicle near the town of Volnovakha.
A regional Ukrainian administration spokesman said the bus was attacked by rebels using Grad rocket launchers while it was carrying civilians through a government checkpoint.
Separatists denied responsibility and said the bus had been attacked by small-arms fire rather than a missile or shell.
Reports from Donetsk said a significant part of the airport’s control tower — already a wrecked hulk with cabling and concrete dangling from it after months of shelling — had been destroyed.
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