Rebel Attack Leaves at Least 14 Dead in Ukraine
At least 14 people were killed, including 10 government soldiers, in fighting overnight in Ukraine, close to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a Ukrainian military spokesman said Friday.
Ukrainian television said on Friday that 20 servicemen had been killed in an attack by pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine during the night, but a military source said the death toll was likely to be lower.
Military officials said a paratrooper unit had come under mortar and tank fire near the town of Shakhtarsk, in the region where a Malaysian airliner was brought down on July 17. The number of casualties on Friday was being checked.
“In total it is known that 14 people died, but the bodies of four of them have not been identified and could be Ukrainian soldiers or terrorists,” said military spokesman Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky.
Dmytrashkivsky added that “so far we are talking about 10 Ukrainian servicemen dead” in the clash, in the town of Shakhtarsk some 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the MH17 site. Earlier the Ukrainian military had said its troops were ambushed.
Ukrainian government forces have intensified their military offensive against the rebels in mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine since the airliner came down, killing 298 people. The separatists are now pegged back in their two main strongholds, the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The United States says the separatists probably shot down the plane by mistake with equipment provided by Russia, but the rebels and Moscow deny the accusation and blame the crash on Kyiv’s military campaign to quell the uprising.
Kyiv said its latest combat report that Russian aircraft had flown over east Ukrainian territory, the latest of several such accusations in the last few weeks, but Moscow has denied such reports.
The United Nations said in a report this week that more than 1,100 people had been killed and nearly 3,500 wounded between mid-April and July 26.
(Some information for this report provided by Reuters and AFP.)
