World

HRABOVE, Ukraine — A Malaysian airliner was brought down over eastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing all 295 people aboard, and sharply raising the stakes in a conflict between Kiev and pro-Moscow rebels in which Russia and the West back opposing sides.

Ukraine accused “terrorists” — militants fighting to unite eastern Ukraine with Russia — of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with a heavy, Soviet-era SA-11 ground-to-air missile as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Leaders of the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic denied any involvement, although around the same time their military commander said his forces had downed a much smaller Ukrainian transport plane. It would be their third such kill this week.

The scale of the disaster affecting scores of foreigners could prove a turning point for international pressure to resolve a crisis that has claimed hundreds of lives in Ukraine since pro-Western protests toppled the Moscow-backed president in Kiev in February and Russia annexed Crimea a month later.

Reuters journalists saw burning and charred wreckage bearing the red and blue Malaysia insignia, and dozens of bodies strewn in fields near the village of Hrabove, 40km from the Russian border near the rebel-held regional capital of Donetsk.

Despite the shooting down of several Ukrainian military aircraft in the area in recent months, including two this week  and renewed accusations from Kiev that Russian forces were taking a direct part, international air lanes had remained open.

US President Barack Obama said he was trying to establish whether Americans were aboard. A Ukrainian official said there were 23. France said at least four of its citizens were aboard.

As word came in of what Ukraine’s Western-backed president called a “terrorist attack”, Obama was on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, discussing a new round of economic sanctions that Washington and its EU partners imposed on Moscow on Wednesday to try to force Putin to do more to curb the revolt against the Western-backed government in Kiev.

They noted the early reports during their telephone call, the White House said, adding that Obama warned of further sanctions if Moscow did not change course in Ukraine.

Wreckage, bodies

Malaysia Airlines said air traffic controllers lost contact with Flight MH-17 at 1415 GMT as it flew over eastern Ukraine towards the Russian border, bound for Asia with 280 passengers and 15 crew aboard. Flight tracking data indicated it was at its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet when it disappeared.

That would be beyond the range of smaller rockets used by the rebels to bring down helicopters and other low-flying Ukrainian military aircraft — but not of the SA-11 system which a Ukrainian official accused Russia of supplying to the rebels.

“I was working in the field on my tractor when I heard the sound of a plane and then a bang,” one local man at told Reuters at Hrabove, known in Russian as Grabovo. “Then I saw the plane hit the ground and break in two. There was thick black smoke.”

An emergency worker said at least 100 bodies had been found so far and that debris was spread over 15km. People were scouring the area for the black box flight recorders and separatists were later quoted as saying they had found one.

“MH-17 is not an incident or catastrophe, it is a terrorist attack,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted. He has stepped up his military campaign against the rebels since a ceasefire late last month failed to produce any negotiations.

Russia, which Western powers accuse of trying to destabilise Ukraine to maintain influence over its old Soviet empire, has accused Kiev’s leaders of mounting a fascist coup. It says it is holding troops in readiness to protect Russian-speakers in the east — the same rationale it used for taking over Crimea.

Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko said on Facebook: “Just now, over Torez, terrorists using a Buk anti-aircraft system kindly given to them by Putin have shot down a civilian airliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.”

The Buk — which means beech tree in Russia — is a 1970s vintage, truck-mounted, radar-guided missile system, codenamed SA-11 Gadfly by Cold War NATO adversaries. It fires a 5.7-metre, 55-kg missile for up to 28km.

“There is no limit to the cynicism of Putin and his terrorists!” Gerashchenko wrote on the social media site. “Europe, USA, Canada, the civilised world, open your eyes! Help us in any way you can! This is a war of good against evil!”

He also published a photograph he said showed a Buk launcher in the centre of the town of Torez on Thursday. It was not possible to verify the image.

Rebel accusation

A rebel leader said Ukrainian forces shot the airliner down and that rebel forces did not have weaponry capable of hitting a plane flying 10km up. Ukrainian officials said their military was not involved in the incident.

The military commander of the rebels, a Russian named Igor Strelkov, had written on his social media page at 1337 GMT, half an hour before the last reported contact with MH-17, that his forces had brought down an Antonov An-26 in the same area. It is a turboprop transport plane of a type used by Ukraine’s forces.

There was no comment on that from the Ukrainian military.

Several Ukrainian planes and helicopters have been shot down in four months of fighting in the area. Ukraine had said an An-26 was shot down on Monday and one of its Sukhoi Su-25 fighters was downed on Wednesday by an air-to-air missile — Kiev’s strongest accusation yet of direct Russian involvement, since the rebels do not appear to have access to aircraft.

Moscow has denied its forces are involved in any way.

The loss of MH-17 is the second disaster for Malaysia Airlines this year, following the mysterious loss of Flight MH-370. It disappeared in March with 239 passengers and crew on board on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

In 2001, Ukraine admitted its military was probably responsible for shooting down a Russian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 78 people on board. A senior Ukrainian official said it had most likely been downed by an accidental hit from an S-200 rocket fired during exercises.

In 1983, a Soviet jet fighter shot down a South Korean airliner after it veered off course into Russian air space and failed to respond to attempts to make contact. All 269 passengers and crew were killed.

In 1988, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner over the Gulf, killing all 290 passengers and crew, in what the United States said was an accident after crew mistook the plane for a fighter. Tehran called it a deliberate attack.

KABUL  — Every single vote cast in Afghanistan’s run-off presidential election will be checked for signs of fraud in a painstaking process set to begin this week — and the stakes could not be higher.

Transported to Kabul under armed guard, these 8.1 million pieces of paper hold the key to which of the two men vying to replace President Hamid Karzai will lead Afghanistan into a new era as US-led troops withdraw.

The operation is set to get under way on Thursday after a historic deal last weekend between presidential candidates Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah — whose rival victory claims, amid allegations of massive fraud, pushed the nation to the brink of disaster.

“There was a fear that this was getting out of control,” said James Cunningham, the US ambassador to Kabul.

Ghani was last week announced the winner of the June 14 vote according to preliminary results, with 56.4 per cent against Abdullah’s 43.5 per cent.

But Abdullah, accusing Ghani of massive ballot-stuffing, swiftly claimed he was the real victor — plunging Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power into crisis.

Rumours swirled that Abdullah’s supporters were planning to march on the presidential palace in Kabul, with some in his camp raising the prospect of forming a “parallel government”.

With the two rivals’ support largely split along ethnic lines, fears grew of a return to the brutal violence of the 1992-1996 civil war.

The United States, haunted by the recent turmoil in Iraq as well as the spectre of more bloodshed in Afghanistan, dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to find a way out.

“The reason we intervened so rapidly was to urge people to stop even thinking about going down that road,” said Cunningham.

Under the deal forged by Kerry after two frantic days of talks, both candidates have agreed to accept the result of the vote audit, while the deal paves the way for a government of national unity, including a role for the losing side.

After weeks of fruitless diplomatic efforts, it was hailed as a triumph.

“Whatever we tried before Kerry came, there were red lines,” said one diplomatic source close to the negotiations.

But both candidates have realised the deal was “the only chance they have” to end the deadlock, the source added.

The logistics of the operation, set to last three weeks or more, are daunting.

Some 23,000 ballot boxes are being transported by the Afghan army and NATO forces to the capital, where they will be examined at 100 verification stations.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it would play a “supporting role” in the process, providing air transport for less than 40 per cent of the votes.

The United Nations, which is overseeing the audit, hopes to post an international observer in each verification station, with most to be drawn from foreign embassies in Kabul.

Pandora’s box

The first technical details were being worked out on Wednesday, according to Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC).

The ballots will be scrutinised against a checklist, with IEC members — under the watch of the international observers — checking for patterns that could indicate voting fraud.

Officials will be looking for similarities in the way ballots have been filled in, for example. They will also be checking that the number of ballots matches the figure on the official results sheet.

Aside from the fraud checks, the historic deal between Ghani and Abdullah also opens the Pandora’s box of how the new national unity government should be structured, and made up.

Crucial details — including whether the government will be based on a parliamentary system, which could mean the delegation of some presidential powers — remain unclear, while the fact that the deal has been agreed but not signed by the rival candidates adds further uncertainty.

The candidates met Tuesday to discuss further details, with Ghani’s spokesman Hamidullah Farooqi saying both candidates had agreed to give posts in their government to members of the losing team.

Farooqi said if Ghani wins, they would convene a “loya jirga” or grand assembly of elders to create a new post for the losing side and work out how such a job would work.

The inauguration of the new president, which was due on August 2, has now been delayed to allow time for the audit.

But instability could surge again at any moment in a country where the Taliban remain a potent and deadly force 13 years after they were toppled from power.

On Tuesday a suicide bomber drove an explosive-laden truck into a busy market in Paktika in the country’s southeast, killing at least 42 people.

THE HAGUE — A court in the Netherlands ruled Wednesday that the Dutch state was liable for the deaths of over 300 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II.

Families of the victims had brought a case the Dutch government over the 1995 killings, accusing Dutch UN peacekeepers of failing to protect the 8,000 slaughtered by ethnic Serb troops just a few months before the end of the Bosnian war.

The judgement was greeted with a mixture of satisfaction and dismay by relatives after the court found the state was liable for those killed after being expelled from a UN compound but not all of the deaths.

“Today we got justice for one group, that’s good,” said Munira Subasic, one of the representatives of the Mothers of Srebrenica group who were in court.

“But how do you explain to a mother that the Dutch are responsible for the death of one son that stood on one side of the fence and not for the one on the other side?” she said through tears.

“The Dutch compound was so big that everyone should have been let in the compound. We will continue to seek truth and justice,” she said, adding that they would appeal the ruling.

The tiny Muslim enclave was under UN protection until July 11, 1995 when it was overrun by ethnic Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic, who is currently on trial on genocide and war crimes charges over the war in Bosnia, including Srebrenica.

Mladic’s troops brushed aside the lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers in a “safe area” where thousands of Muslims from surrounding villages had gathered for protection.

In the subsequent days, almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves in what two international courts have ruled was genocide. 

‘Dutch forces acted unlawfully’ 

“The state is liable for the loss suffered by relatives of the men who were deported by the Bosnian Serbs from the Dutchbat [Dutch battalion] compound in Potocari in the afternoon of 13 July, 1995,” judge Larissa Elwin said.

“Dutchbat should have taken into account the possibility that these men would be the victim of genocide and that it can be said with sufficient certainty that, had the Dutchbat allowed them to stay at the compound, these men would have remained alive,” she ruled.

“By cooperating in the deportation of these men, Dutchbat acted unlawfully.”

However, the court ruled that the state was not liable on all counts.

“Dutchbat’s acts prior to the fall of Srebrenica can neither be attributed to the State, nor are they considered to be unlawful,” the judge said.

“The fact that air support failed to materialise or that it was stopped, cannot be attributed to the state either, just as the fact that the enclave was not recaptured.”

The Dutch defence ministry said that the court had ruled “that the state was not responsible for the fall of the enclave itself”, but that it “regrets what happened at the time with the local population”.

The ministry has not yet announced whether it will appeal.

Seeking justice for years  

The Mothers of Srebrenica, representing some 6,000 widows and other relatives, have been seeking justice for years for the massacre, which the UN’s highest International Court of Justice has ruled was genocide.

In April, the Dutch government said it would pay 20,000 euros to relatives of three Bosnian Muslim men murdered after peacekeepers expelled them from the UN compound in 1995.

That move followed a Dutch court’s landmark ruling last year that the state was liable for the deaths, the first time a government had been held responsible for the actions of peacekeepers operating under a UN mandate.

Marco Gerritsen, the lawyer who represented the victims’ families, said whether his clients receive compensation would depend on the Dutch government.

“If it accepts the judgement, it can go very fast, but I think that this case was not closed today,” he said.

Wednesday’s ruling came just days after thousands of people gathered in Srebrenica to mark the 19th anniversary of the killings.

So far, the remains of 6,066 people have been exhumed from mass graves in region for reburial.

Both Mladic, dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, and Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, considered masterminds of the massacre, are now being tried by a UN court for war crimes and genocide.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Ukraine’s Western-backed leaders on Tuesday invited pro-Kremlin insurgents to a videoconference aimed at halting spiralling violence and what Kiev warned was an imminent invasion by thousands of Russian troops.

Kiev sharply raised the stakes in Europe’s most explosive crisis in decades by declaring on Monday that an Ukrainian transport plane downed in the eastern conflict zone had been hit by a rocket fired from the Russian side of the frontier between the two ex-Soviet states.

Russia has broken with its traditional denials of all links to the uprising by not publicly responding to the charge.

A top Ukrainian general went a step further by telling a live television audience in Kiev that he feared a Russian invasion was imminent.

“Ukraine, like never before, stands on the cusp of a wide-scale aggression from our current northern border,” said National Security and Defence Council Deputy Secretary Mykhaylo Koval.

The former defence minister said the Kremlin had parked 22,000 troops in the annexed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and had other units stretching from the north-central region of Chernigiv to the southeastern edge of the Russian-Ukranian border on the Sea of Azov.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s office said Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin also presented “photo and video evidence” of Russia covertly supplying the fighters with weapons and armoured vehicles.

President Vladimir Putin rejects accusations of orchestrating the uprising in reprisal for the February ouster of a Russian-backed leader and Kiev’s subsequent signature of a historic EU deal instead of a new Kremlin pact.

Fears of Russia’s direct intervention and the soaring civilian toll — 23 more people were reported killed overnight — has intensified pressure on Western allies to quickly address their worst standoff with Russia since the Cold War.

Skype talks 

Germany and France have been spearheading EU efforts to revive an Ukrainian truce that could save the bloc from having to introduce sweeping economic sanctions against energy-rich Russia to which Putin has already vowed to respond.

The United States has pressed EU leaders to impose arms sale restrictions and limited financial sanctions on Russia when they meet at a summit in Brussels on Wednesday.

Indirect negotiations between Kiev — represented by former president Leonid Kuchma — and the separatists aimed at extending a shaky 10-day ceasefire fizzled out after two rounds last month.

But Poroshenko’s office said he had agreed with Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel to arrange “Skype videoconference talks” that Kiev had first suggested last week.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Vasyl Zvarych expressed confidence that the consultations would be held on Tuesday.

Soaring civilian toll

The border became the conflict’s new frontline after rebels last week evacuated a host of towns and cities that they had held since early April in the coal mining region of Donetsk.

The militias have since concentrated their forces around the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk — both capitals of their own “People’s Republics” — and are hoping for new weapons deliveries to revive their campaign.

Witnesses in Donetsk told AFP they had seen the insurgents dispatch four tanks and eight armoured transport vehicles towards Lugansk to help repel an intensifying air and artillery push by Kiev forces on the city of 420,000 people.

Defence officials said four of the downed plane’s eight crew had been rescued in rebel territory.

“Two servicemen were captured by the rebels and efforts to rescue them are under way. The fate of the other two crew is unknow,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.

Ukraine also temporarily grounded all its jets in the two separatist regions as a safety precaution.

Lugansk on Tuesday declared three days mourning for 17 civilians killed since the weekend in artillery strikes that both sides have blamed on each other.

But local authorities reported the death of nearly two dozen more civilians across the rustbelt — including 11 people killed when their building apartment block crumbled after being hit by a missile in the Russian border town of Snizhne.

A defence spokesman said six Ukrainian soldiers had also been killed overnight as the toll in the low-scale war approached 600 civilians and fighters on both sides.

The National Security and Defence Council reported the death of 258 servicemen and capture of another 45 since Kiev launched its “anti-terrorist operation” on April 13.

MOSCOW — Twenty-one people died and scores more were wounded after a train derailed in Moscow’s packed metro during rush hour on Tuesday in the worst accident ever to hit one of the world’s busiest subways.

Russian television described scenes of chaos and panic on the capital’s famed system, saying passengers fell like dominoes when the train travelling at 70 kilometres an hour braked abruptly, and three carriages derailed and crumpled.

Rescue teams were still combing through the mangled metal carriages hours later in an attempt to extricate several bodies.

“I thought it was the end,” one surviving passenger said on television. “We were trapped and only got out through a miracle.”

President Vladimir Putin, who is on a trip to Brazil, ordered a criminal probe into the tragedy that put a huge strain on the city of some 12 million and snarled traffic on its notoriously clogged roads amid a heatwave.

Sirens wailed as dozens of ambulances rushed to help treat the wounded and helicopters buzzed overhead to evacuate those with serious injuries, AFP journalists said at the scene outside the Park Pobedy metro station in western Moscow.

Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told Russian agencies that 21 people had died.

More than 160 people were hospitalised, including 42 still in intensive care, the head of Moscow’s health department Georgy Golukhov told journalists.

At least two foreign nationals — a Tajik and a Chinese — were among the dead, Golukhov said.

“This is a huge catastrophe for us,” deputy prime minister Olga Golodets said in televised remarks.

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, led a prayer to honour the victims, while city hall called for a day of mourning on Wednesday.

The accident raised calls for urgent improvements to the ornate but overcrowded metro, which first opened in 1935 under Stalin.

The Investigative Committee said it was looking at a number of possible causes including a mechanical flaw in a carriage and a power failure.

A terror attack has been ruled out, the committee said.

Moscow deputy mayor Pyotr Biryukov said earlier that several people had been trapped in the train, while the authorities said more than 1,000 had to be evacuated.

Passengers said smoke quickly spread through the carriages and rescue workers treated them with oxygen.

“After the most thorough investigation there will be not only dismissals but also criminal cases against those who are responsible for this tragedy,” Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

“What happened is one of the most major accidents of recent times.”

News of the crash quickly spread on social networks.

Alexei Naryshkin, a presenter on Echo of Moscow radio, posted a photograph on Twitter of rescue workers carrying a body in a black bag.

“They are laying out the injured. They constantly go down with stretchers. They carry them out. Some are unconscious. Some are moaning with pain,” Naryshkin wrote.

Another witness, a young man in a polo shirt, said in televised comments: “I got into the carriage and after about 20 seconds, the light went out and the train was just pulled apart. I was just thrown into the centre of the carriage.”

“Panic erupted,” he said.

“We climbed out of the carriages and we saw a blockage, men took hammers and pliers and broke it down and we walked on. The train was smashed, the chassis was just pulled apart.”

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — A car packed with explosives exploded on Tuesday as it sped through a crowded market in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Paktika, killing at least 89 people, officials said, one of the most violent attacks in the country in a year.

The huge explosion took place not far from the porous border with Pakistan’s North Waziristan region, where the military has been attacking hideouts of the Pakistani Taliban in the past few weeks, prompting militants to retreat toward Afghanistan.

“The number of victims may increase,” said General Zahir Azimi, a defence ministry spokesman.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack as a “despicable criminal act”, which was a serious violation of international law, his spokesman said.

The attack comes at an uneasy time in Afghanistan as the country recounts votes from a disputed presidential election which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt.

But the Taliban distanced themselves from Tuesday’s attack. The movement’s leaders have ordered militants not to target civilians.

“The truth behind this attack will become clear after an investigation, but we clearly announce that it was not done by the Mujahedeen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement.

“The Mujahedeen do not conduct such attacks and such attacks do not bring any benefit to them.”

A local deputy police chief, Nissar Ahmad Abdulrahimzai, told Reuters that police had been tipped about the car and were chasing it when it exploded.

“The explosion was so big it destroyed many shops. Dozens of people are trapped under the roofs,” Mohammad Raza Kharoti, the district governor, told Reuters.

“The number of wounded will rise to more than 100 and the number of those martyred will also increase.”

In Kabul, a remote-control bomb concealed by a roadside killed two employees of President Hamid Karzai’s media office and wounded five, police said. The Taliban claimed responsibility.

The attacks took place as foreign troops are gradually withdrawing from the country. The United Nations said last week that civilian casualties jumped by almost a quarter in the first half of this year as hostilities escalated.

ABUJA — Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan promised on Monday that more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Islamist militants would soon return home, teenage Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai said after meeting him.

Malala, who became a global celebrity after surviving being shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, was visiting Nigeria to support an international campaign for the release of the teenage students abducted in mid-April by the Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram.

“The president promised me... that the abducted girls will return to their homes soon,” Malala, who has called the 219 missing students her “sisters”, told a news conference after a 45-minute meeting with Jonathan at the presidential villa.

The Pakistani teenager, who turned 17 on Saturday, at the weekend met parents of the schoolgirls snatched from the northeastern village of Chibok by Boko Haram militants fighting to establish an Islamic state in religiously mixed Nigeria.

The Nigerian girls’ plight triggered an international #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign supported by Michelle Obama and Angelina Jolie.

This has drawn attention to the war in Nigeria’s northeast, where Boko Haram, which is inspired by the Taliban and whose name means “Western education is sinful”, has killed thousands and abducted hundreds since launching an uprising in 2009.

With the girls still missing three months after their April 14 kidnap, Jonathan faces criticism at home and abroad over the deteriorating security situation in Africa’s leading oil producer and biggest economy.

Nigeria is receiving intelligence and surveillance assistance from the United States, Britain, France, Israel and other allies but has so far shown little progress in getting the Chibok girls back or in halting almost daily militant raids.

Suspected Boko Haram fighters on Monday attacked a village on market day in northeast Nigeria not far from the Cameroon border, killing at least five local people, and burning homes and shops, a resident and a security source said.

The resident from Ville, near Lassa in the south of Borno state, Suleiman Haruna, told Reuters 20 Boko Haram fighters were killed when local vigilantes fought back but this could not be independently confirmed. The Islamist group has often attacked local rural markets, opening fire on traders and shoppers.

‘Pursuing all feasible options’

Malala told reporters she would hold the Nigerian leader to his pledge that the girls would be home soon.

“I will from now be counting days and will be looking. I can’t stop this campaign until I see these girls return back to their families and continue their education,” she said.

She added that Jonathan had also promised that once the missing girls were rescued, they would be given scholarships to go to school in any part of Nigeria.

Pressed by journalists, Malala said Jonathan described the girls’ situation as “complicated” and that their lives could be put at risk by a military rescue attempt.

“But the president said these girls are his daughters and he is pained by their sufferings and that he has his own daughters and he can feel what they are feeling,” she said.

The Nigerian presidency said Jonathan assured Malala that his government “was very actively pursuing all feasible options to achieve the safe return of the abducted girls”.

“The great challenge in rescuing the Chibok girls is the need to ensure that they are rescued alive,” Jonathan said, according to the presidency statement.

Pakistani Taliban militants shot Malala for her passionate advocacy of women’s right to education. She survived after being airlifted to Britain for treatment, and has since become a symbol of defiance against the militants operating in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

KIEV — Ukraine on Monday accused Russian army officers of fighting alongside separatists in the east of the country and said Moscow was once more building up its troops on the joint border.

A missile that downed a Ukrainian transport plane carrying eight people near the border was probably fired from Russia, Ukrainian officials said.

President Petro Poroshenko held an emergency meeting of his security chiefs after a weekend of Ukrainian air strikes on rebel positions near the border with Russia and charges by Moscow that Kiev killed a Russian man with a cross-border shell.

The war of words between Kiev and Moscow, and intense fighting, in which Ukrainian forces say they inflicted heavy losses on the rebels, marked a sharp escalation in the three and a half month conflict in which several hundred Ukrainian servicemen, civilians and rebels have been killed.

“Information has... been confirmed that Russian staff officers are taking part in military operations against Ukrainian forces,” Poroshenko said.

Poroshenko made similar complaints of Russian incursions on Sunday to the European Union with an eye to pushing the bloc to exert greater pressure and possibly more sanctions, on Moscow.

Poroshenko told his security chiefs that government forces, which lost 23 men in a rocket attack on an army camp last Friday, were now facing a new Russian missile system and there would have to be a change in tactics. He gave no details.

Accusing Russia of embarking on a course of escalation in Ukraine’s eastern regions, National and Security Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko told journalists: “In the past 24 hours, deployment of [Russian] units and military equipment across the border from the Sumy and Luhansk border points was noticed. The Russian Federation continues to build up troops on the border.”

NATO said Russia had increased its forces along the border and now had 10,000-12,000 troops in the area.

Lysenko added three Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 12 more injured in the fighting in the past 24 hours.

Moscow’s response to the cross-border shelling and the Ukrainian reports of Russian troops being moved up to the border raised again the prospect of Russian intervention, after weeks in which President Vladimir Putin had appeared intent on disengaging, pulling back tens of thousands of troops he had massed at the frontier.

Military success

The Ukrainian army said it had broken a rebel encirclement of Luhansk Airport on Sunday night. A spokesman for the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic said 30 volunteer fighters had been killed in Ukrainian fire on Oleksandrivka, a village to the east of the town, Russia’s Interfax news agency said.

As military action continued on Monday near the rebel-controlled border town of Luhansk, Ukraine’s defence minister said a Ukrainian AN-26 transport plane, taking part in the military campaign against the rebels, had been shot down by a rocket which was “probably” fired from Russian territory.

Officials said two crew members, out of the eight people on board, had been in contact with the army general staff, and a search and rescue operation was under way. The fate of the other six people was not immediately known.

Defence Minister Valery Heletey said the plane had been flying at a height of 6,500 metres and was out of range of any weapon the separatists had.

“So the plane was downed from another, more powerful rocket weapon which was fired, probably, from the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said, according to Poroshenko’s website.

The rocket may have been a Pantsir ground-to-air or self-guided air-to-air rocket fired from a Russian plane, he said.

Lysenko said separatists, backed by what he described as Russian “mercenaries”, had fired on Ukrainian border guards in an attempt to give cover as armoured vehicles and equipment were being brought into the country.

And he again rejected Russian charges that Ukraine forces had fired a shell over the border killing a Russian man on Sunday — an incident that Moscow has described as an “aggressive act” which would have “irreversible consequences”.

“The [rebel] fighters systematically fire mortars and shoot into Russian territory, which killed a Russian citizen,” Lysenko told journalists.

Russia said it had invited monitors from the OSCE, a European security and rights body, to visit two of its border crossings with Ukraine as a sign of goodwill.

In a weekend of fierce combat, Ukraine said its warplanes had inflicted heavy losses on the pro-Russian separatists in air strikes on their positions, including an armoured convoy which Kiev said had crossed the border from Russia.

Poroshenko’s office said Kiev would present documentary proof of incursions from Russia to the international community via diplomats.

But Russia kept up pressure on Kiev over the cross-border shell incident. A Russian newspaper, citing a source close to the Kremlin, said on Monday that Moscow was considering the possibility of pinpoint strikes on Ukraine in retaliation.

EU sanctions

Poroshenko on Sunday complained of alleged Russian incursions into Ukraine in a telephone call with the European Union’s Herman Van Rompuy.

The EU — Ukraine’s strategic partner with which it signed a landmark political and trade agreement last month — targeted a group of separatist leaders with travel bans and asset freezes on Saturday but avoided fresh sanctions on Russian business.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in April when armed pro-Russian fighters seized towns and government buildings, weeks after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in response to the overthrow of a pro-Moscow president in Kiev.

Well over 200 Ukrainian servicemen had been killed in the fighting and several hundred civilians and rebels.

The fighting has escalated sharply in recent days after Ukrainian forces pushed the rebels out of their most heavily fortified bastion, the town of Slaviansk.

Hundreds of rebels, led by a self-proclaimed defence minister from Moscow, have retreated to the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, built reinforcements and pledged to make a stand. The once-bustling city has been emptying in fear of a battle.

Rebel fighters on Monday were evacuating about 200 Donetsk residents by bus across the Russian border into the Rostov area.

Vladimir, a 55-year-old coal miner, was sending his wife with two children to relatives across the border. “The Ukrainians have already cut off water. Electricity is only just working. How can you live without water and light?” he said.

DONETSK, Ukraine/MOSCOW — Russia threatened Ukraine on Sunday with “irreversible consequences” after a man was killed by a shell fired across the border from Ukraine, an incident Moscow described in warlike terms as aggression that must be met with a response.

Although both sides have reported cross-border shootings in the past, it appears to be the first time Moscow has reported fatalities on its side of the border in the three-month conflict which has killed hundreds of people in Ukraine.

Kiev called the accusation its forces had fired across the border “total nonsense” and suggested the attack could have been the work of rebels trying to provoke Moscow to intervene on their behalf. The rebels denied they were responsible.

Inside Ukraine, combat has intensified dramatically since a rebel missile attack that killed dozens of government troops on Friday. Local officials said on Sunday 18 people were killed in shooting incidents in the two main rebel-held cities.

Russia’s Interfax news agency said fierce fighting had broken out on the outskirts of rebel-controlled Luhansk, a city near the border with Russia, and the Ukrainian army had attacked with a force of 70 tanks.

Kiev said it had bombarded a convoy of 100 armoured vehicles and trucks that had crossed into Ukraine carrying in rebel fighters from Russia. It also said seven of its troops had been killed in attacks.

Moscow’s bellicose response to the cross-border shelling raises the renewed prospect of overt Russian intervention, after weeks in which President Vladimir Putin had appeared intent on disengaging, pulling back tens of thousands of troops he had massed at the frontier.

Russia sent Ukraine a note of protest describing the incident as “an aggressive act by the Ukrainian side against sovereign Russian territory and the citizens of the Russian Federation”, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement warning of “irreversible consequences”.

“This represents a qualitative escalation of the danger to our citizens, now even on our own territory. Of course this naturally cannot pass without a response,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told Rossiya-24 state TV.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said a shell had landed in the yard of a house in a small town on the Russian side of the frontier, killing a man and wounding a woman. The Russian town is called Donetsk, sharing the name of the Ukrainian city of 1 million people that the rebels have declared capital of an independent “people’s republic”.

‘Total nonsense’

Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, said reports that Ukrainian forces were responsible were “total nonsense and the information is untrue”.

“The forces of the anti-terrorist operation do not fire on the territory of a neighbouring country and they do not fire on residential areas,” he said. “We have many examples of terrorists carrying out provocation shooting, including into Russian territory and then accusing Ukrainian forces of it.”

The rebels denied blame. Interfax news agency quoted the rebels’ self-proclaimed first deputy prime minister, Andrey Prugin, as saying he was “90 per cent certain” it was Ukrainian troops that had fired across the border, because the rebels were short on ammunition and cautious about where they fired.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in April when armed pro-Russian fighters seized towns and government buildings, weeks after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in response to the overthrow of a pro-Moscow president in Kiev.

The fighting has escalated sharply in recent days after Ukrainian forces pushed the rebels out of their most heavily-fortified bastion, the town of Slaviansk.

Hundreds of rebels, led by a self-proclaimed defence minister from Moscow, have retreated to the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, built reinforcements and pledged to make a stand. The once-bustling city has been emptying in fear of a battle.

“Everybody here is sitting on a suitcase. People are only prevented from leaving by work — that is if they have any work. If they [the Ukrainian forces] are going to bomb then I shall, of course, go too,” said Olga, 35.

On the streets there are fewer and fewer cars. Some drivers no longer bother to stop at red lights since there are no police around and few vehicles.

Rebel fighters vowed to fight to the end if the army comes.

“We are ready for them. We will not leave. Let women and children leave. But I don’t care much for grown men going. They are cowards, rascals, scum,” said a man named Lis, who described himself as an officer in the Vostok battalion, a rebel force.

Kiev says Moscow has provoked the rebellion, and allowed fighters and heavy weapons to cross the border with impunity. It has struggled to reassert control over the eastern frontier, recapturing border positions from rebels.

The past two days have seen an escalation in retaliation after dozens of Ukrainian troops were killed in a rocket attack on a base near the border on Friday. Kiev said it killed hundreds of rebels in air strikes on Saturday, although there was no independent confirmation of such high casualties and the rebels denied suffering serious losses.

Ukrainian security spokesman Lysenko said on Sunday forces had used artillery to strike a convoy of about 100 armoured vehicles and trucks after confirming that the convoy was carrying “a large number of recruits” into Ukraine from Russia.

He said seven Ukrainian service members had died in attacks in the east in the past day.

The Donetsk city council said in a statement on its web site on Sunday that 12 people had been killed at a mining settlement near the Ukrainian city. It gave no details of who had fired. Municipal authorities in Luhansk, capital of the other rebellious eastern province, said six people were killed in clashes there. It also gave no details of who was to blame.

Western countries have threatened to impose harsh economic sanctions on Moscow if it intervenes openly. Russia denies fuelling the conflict, but Kiev and Western countries say it has supported the rebels.

In Kiev, President Petro Poroshenko’s office said he had turned down an invitation to attend the World Cup football final in Brazil because of the situation in Ukraine.

KABUL — He was only on the ground for 48 hours, but America’s top diplomat John Kerry may well have helped prevent Afghanistan from sliding into another bloody ethnic war.

The helicopters were waiting for the US secretary of state when he arrived in Kabul from Beijing early Friday on a last-minute mission to broker an end to a tense political impasse.

Some 48 hours later they flew him back over the darkened city streets from the fortress-like US embassy compound to his plane — a deal triumphantly in his hand.

Few had believed it possible that Kerry could bring together two presidential rivals bitterly at odds over disputed elections, and help avert fears of ethnic violence in a country ravaged by decades of war.

But the indefatigable 70-year-old dropped a political bombshell when he announced that rivals Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani had agreed that every one of the eight million votes cast in their June run-off poll would be audited.

Just days earlier the two men were barely speaking, as Abdullah vehemently accused Ghani of stealing victory by stuffing the ballots.

But standing next to each other with Kerry late on Saturday before the world’s cameras, they clasped hands, smiling, and raised them in the air.

With that single dramatic show of unity, Kerry may well have helped guide Afghanistan’s young democracy away from a return to the bloody ethnic civil war of the 1990s.

The announcement followed two days of marathon meetings, with Kerry and his staff shuttling between the two candidates and their teams in the embassy.

He also met for hours one-on-one with each candidate.

With Kerry due in Austria for talks on a Iran nuclear agreement, Saturday’s window for a deal was closing rapidly.

“It wasn’t until the 11th hour... that we had a full agreement,” a senior US official who took part in the negotiations told journalists.

The talks had focused on the best mechanism for auditing the poll results.

A second track sought to persuade the feuding rivals to meet to discuss their differences and clear the way towards a national unity government.

Afghan analyst Younus Fakour said the agreement had “prevented a disaster in Afghanistan, it prevented the creation of a parallel government, it prevented chaos” — and the national unity government element was crucial.

“Before, the candidates were afraid that if one wins, the other will be left out. But with this they are sure they will be part of the next government,” he told AFP.

By midday Saturday it became clear that given doubts over a UN proposal to audit votes from around 35 per cent of polling stations, it made more sense to work towards an unprecedented review of all ballots cast.

“While it’s more resource-intensive, while it’s time-intensive, a full audit stands to more significantly improve the credibility of the outcome just because it’s more extensive,” a second US official said.

As reporters awaiting a press conference at UN mission headquarters broke the Ramadan fast with a hastily arranged “iftar” of take-away lamb, rice, bread and dates, Kerry persuaded the two men to meet face-to-face.

Ghani, a former World Bank economist, was asked to join talks with Abdullah as they also hammered out a structure for a national unity government.

“When Dr Ghani walked in, the two approached each other and immediately embraced and there was clearly a degree of affection between the two,” the first US official said.

“For those of us who had sat through these meetings over 48 hours it was a welcome sign, a signal that actually here is something that may stick because it’s going to require the personalities involved to be committed to it.”

The dispute had raised fears of an ethnic split, as Abdullah draws support from Tajiks and other northern groups while Ghani is backed by Pashtun tribes of the south and east.

Both US officials praised the role of the United Nations which has been working intensively for weeks to break the deadlock, and which flew in its chief electoral official for the negotiations.

The US will now support calls from the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, for additional resources and manpower to help audit all ballots in coming weeks.

“You deliver miracles,” Kubis told Kerry, as they got the final seal of approval from outgoing President Hamid Karzai.

“Because what we witnessed today was not just a topmost diplomatic achievement, it was close to a miracle.”

Kate Clark of the Afghan Analysts’ Network hailed the US role and said the deal’s “strong international underpinning” gave cause for optimism.

While it still remains unclear how the agreement will play out, one Afghan official e-mailed a member of Kerry’s team voicing heartfelt thanks and adding that “most Afghans will sleep more peacefully tonight”.