EU in deal on Russia sanctions
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EUROPEAN Union governments reached a deal to impose economic sanctions against Russia, targeting its oil industry, defence, dual-use goods and sensitive technologies, diplomats said.
The sanctions will be reviewed after three months, one diplomat said.
The sanctions would start a new phase in the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry agreed in a phone conversation yesterday that fighting near the site where a Malaysian airliner crashed in eastern Ukraine needs to be stopped, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.
Meanwhile, intense fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine killed dozens of civilians, soldiers and rebels, as Kiev pressed on with an offensive, including near the wreckage of Malaysian flight MH17.
Shells hit the center of Donetsk, a city with a pre-war population of nearly a million people where residents fear they will be trapped on a battlefield between advancing Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels who have vowed to make a stand.
Ukrainian forces have been pushing rebel units back towards their two main urban strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk and have sought to encircle them in several places.
The government says its forces have retaken several villages in the rolling countryside near where the airliner crashed on July 17, killing all 298 passengers, most of them Dutch.
In Donetsk, the body of a dead man lay in rubble behind a badly damaged 10-storey residential building hit by shelling. The side of the building was splintered. Rebels at the scene placed body parts on a nylon sheet and carried it on a stretcher to a green van.
Municipal officials said up to 17 people, including children, were killed in fighting on Monday evening in the town of Horlivka, a rebel stronghold north of Donetsk that saw fierce battles between the rival forces in the last few days.
In the city of Luhansk, officials said five civilians were killed when shelling hit a retirement home.
“The enemy is throwing everything it has into the battle to complete encirclement of the DNR,” Igor Strelkov, a Muscovite rebel commander, said on Monday, referring to the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.”
Rebel leaders insist that Moscow is not supplying them. Russia also denies Western accusations that it is supporting the rebellion with arms and troops.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, Andriy Lysenko, blamed Russia for shelling a Ukrainian border crossing point and military positions from across the border to help the rebels.
Western countries say Moscow has stepped up its support for the rebels since the downing of the airliner, which Washington says was shot down accidentally by rebels using an advanced Russian-made surface-to-air missile.
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