Truce hope fades

Street-to-street fighting broke out for the first time inside a flashpoint town in east Ukraine yesterday, officials and pro-Russian rebels said, dealing a harsh blow to a fragile ceasefire just three days old.

The combat in Debaltseve, a strategic railway hub located between the separatist-held cities of Donetsk and Lugansk, was described as "intense".

The town is largely encircled by heavily armed rebels who previously had been exchanging artillery fire with up to 8,000 government troops holed up inside.

Ilya Kiva, a deputy regional police chief inside the town who was reached by telephone, said the rebels had entered Debaltseve and were using small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

"Battles are going on right now with rebels storming our positions," a Ukraine military spokesman in Kiev, Alexander Motuzyanik, confirmed to AFP.

Another spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, denied rebel claims that dozens of government troops had surrendered. "Our military positions held" and soldiers were riposting, he said.

Rebels quoted by Russian-language news agencies said their forces had entered Debaltseve from the east and the north and killed "many" Ukrainian soldiers in a "mopping up" operation. They said they had taken control of the railway station.

The hostilities and rebel checkpoints outside the town prevented journalists from entering to verify the situation.

The fighting, though, severely undermines an already shaky European-brokered ceasefire that came into effect across eastern Ukraine on Sunday.

A second step of that truce was meant to see the warring sides move their heavy weapons back from the frontline from Tuesday. But Kiev and the rebels accused each other of repeated violations that prevented that happening.

Lysenko accused the rebels of breaking the truce 164 times and said that "despite the ceasefire announcement, the enemy had been preparing for active combat operations".

He affirmed that Kiev was still prepared to withdraw its weapons "as soon as the ceasefire is applied along the frontline".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a late Monday phone call in which they agreed "concrete measures" to allow OSCE monitors to fulfil their role of observing the ceasefire, according to Merkel's office.