| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| Rebels Kill 23 Ukraine Troops, Shredding Truce Hopes |
| 2014-07-12 |
| [An Nahar] Ukraine's military on Friday reported losing 23 servicemen in festivities across the separatist east that threatened to shatter slim Western hopes of a truce in Europe's deadliest conflict in decades. The defense ministry said the toll included 19 troops who died in a hail of rockets fired from a truck-mounted Grad rocket launcher system -- a type of weapon both Kiev and Washington insist could only have been covertly supplied to the rebels by Russia. The official front man of Ukraine's intensifying eastern assault added that 93 servicemen had sustained "wounds and contusions of varying severity". "The rebels will pay for the life of every one of our servicemen with tens and hundred of their own," Ukraine's Western-backed President Petro Poroshenko told an emergency security meeting. "Not a single terrorist will avoid responsibility," he vowed. "Every single one of them will get their just desserts." Friday's official corpse count is the highest since Poroshenko tore up a brief ceasefire with the rebels on July 1 and relaunched an offensive that managed to dislodge the militias from key eastern strongholds they had held since early April. The military separately claimed "eliminating" nearly 100 fighters in one of Ukraine's bloodiest days since the start of the crisis last November as anti-government protests spiraled into revolution and a protracted standoff with pro-Russian rebels. The tide in the eastern uprising turned last weekend when resurgent government forces managed to flush out the separatists from a string of eastern towns and cities that hold historic Russian ties. Most of the militias have since retreated to Donetsk and the neighboring industrial city of Lugansk -- both capitals of their own "People's Republic" that refuse to recognize Kiev's new West-leaning government and are seeking annexation by Russia. The conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 550 people and displaced tens of thousands across a rustbelt that had long been the economic engine of the troubled post-Soviet state. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 "The rebels will pay for the life of every one of our servicemen with tens and hundred of their own," Ukraine's Western-backed President Petro Poroshenko told an emergency security meeting. International outcry in 5..4..3 |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2014-07-12 02:27 |