Ukraine Reports Heavy Fighting Around Malaysia Airlines Crash Site

By LUKAS I. ALPERT in Moscow and PHILIP SHISHKIN in Donetsk, Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal

July 28, 2014

For weeks, residents of the three villages where the debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 landed have heard the fighting around them, and hoped the violence would pass them by. But on Monday, the crash site turned into the newest front in the war.

Natalya Voloshina, mayor of Petropavlivka, one of those villages, said a Ukrainian armored column traveled through the tiny settlement Monday morning, followed by a rebel regiment. As night fell, she said, the sound of gunfire began echoing off the walls of the small houses in her village and neighboring ones.

After the horror of luggage, plane parts and hundreds of bodies raining down on them, many villagers had hoped the catastrophe would force a move toward peace. “It’s the opposite way around,” Ms. Voloshina said in a telephone interview. “It’s getting even worse.”

Ukrainian forces have made rapid gains in recent days near the downed plane and appear to be threatening to split the rebels’ territory in two, with the key cities of Donetsk and Luhansk cut off from each other.

Rebels confirmed much of the fighting, but insisted they still held most of their positions in the area. A rebel official acknowledged losing control of the village of Rozsypne, where some of the plane’s debris landed, Russia’s state-run RIA-Novosti reported.

“The fighting is continuing but we do not have complete control of the village,” the unnamed official told the news agency.

The Ukrainian army was engaged in gunbattles with separatist fighters at Savur-Mohyla, Torez and Shakhtarsk to the south of the debris field, said Col. Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the National Security and Defense Council.

He said government fighters were also battling rebels at a town to the north and were beginning an offensive southeast of the site.

The army also engaged in a battle outside the town of Lutuhyno, near the regional capital of Luhansk, amid reports that the government had suffered heavy losses there.

Col. Lysenko said government forces hadn’t violated a pledge made last week to stay out of a 25-mile-diameter circle around the crash site, and accused rebels of firing on the site in an effort to destroy incriminating evidence.

The rebels made the same charge against Kiev on Monday, saying it had launched the military operations near the crash site to hinder an investigation.

“That way one can keep blaming us and Russia without evidence,” said Vladimir Antufeyev, the security chief of the separatist government in Donetsk.

The Dutch government said forensic experts were unable to reach the crash site on Monday for the third straight day because of explosions and fighting in the area.

Alexander Borodai, the self-proclaimed prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, left the rebel-held territory for Moscow on Monday, triggering speculation that separatist leaders were abandoning the almost-surrounded city.

‪Vladimir Antufeyev, the security chief of the separatist government said Mr. Borodai went to Russia to discuss “humanitarian aid,” and that he planned to return soon.

Later in the day, rebel military commander Igor Girkin, a Russian citizen better known under his nom de guerre, Igor Strelkov, held a hastily arranged press briefing in Donetsk that seemed designed in part to prove that top separatist leaders hadn’t all left town.

Mr. Strelkov said Ukrainian forces had deployed “an usual quantity” of armor, and said the rebels had killed mercenaries driving Ukrainian tanks in a battle near the Russian border. The claims couldn’t be independently confirmed.

Kiev and U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed the rebels for firing the surface-to-air missile that brought Flight 17 down on July 17, and have accused Russia of continuing to supply the separatists with heavy weapons. Rebel leaders deny downing the aircraft and Russia has suggested Ukrainian government forces may have been responsible.