Pro-Russian fighters have withdrawn from a strategic frontline village, Ukraine’s military reported on Friday, although some troops doubted whether the surprise retreat and lull in fighting would last.
Lying just 10km east of the Sea of Azov industrial port of Mariupol — the target of repeated rebel attacks — Shyrokyne has been one of the deadliest hot spots of the 15-month separatist conflict in the ex-Soviet state’s industrial east.
“The rebels withdrew to the east, leaving the settlement of Shyrokyne completely destroyed,” military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk told reporters in Kiev.
However, separatists warned that “unilateral demilitarization” by their side might not be enough to establish a lasting peace.
“We are waiting for a similar step [from Ukraine],” separatist leader Denis Pushilin told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
A top official with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said his Ukrainian monitoring teams had also not found any pro-Russian fighters in the village, Interfax reported.
Western powers, Russia and the OSCE have repeatedly urged the two sides to respect a February truce that demanded the immediate withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front.
However, mutual mistrust has prompted daily exchanges of fire and turned Shyrokyne into an important staging post for rebel attacks on Mariupol — a port city the insurgents had vowed to seize in January before claiming to have changed their mind.
Ukrainian soldiers manning positions in and around the devastated village expressed doubts about the significance of the militias’ withdrawal.
“This is just a pullback of one infantry unit — no more,” Sedoi, the nom de guerre adopted by the commander of the pro-Kiev forces in the village, told reporters.
“It has absolutely no effect on the situation. The threat is still there, because their tank and artillery forces remain very close to Shyrokyne and could always attack again,” he said.
The Ukrainian crisis has claimed more than 6,500 lives since breaking out in the wake of the ouster in Kiev of a Russian-backed administration in February last year and its replacement by a strongly pro-European team.
The insurgents’ retreat along the southern edge of the front comes in a week that has witnessed a marked de-escalation of fighting and drop in the number of daily reported deaths.
However, diplomatic tensions between Moscow and Kiev remain high, with Russia on Friday accusing Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko of refusing to agree to final peace terms with the separatist command.
The Western-backed Ukrainian leader irked both Moscow and the fighters by unveiling draft changes to the constitution that gave sweeping powers to the regions, but critically failed to address the rebels’ main demands.
His amendments, which Poroshenko on Friday asked parliament to approve within the next two weeks, refuse to add to the constitution the semi-autonomous status demanded by militants who now control land roughly the size of Wales.
Rebel parts of the mostly Russian-speaking Lugansk and Donetsk regions would like to see their right to partial self-rule spelt out in constitutional amendments that would be enormously difficult to overturn.
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