Shelling resumed around the contested Ukrainian town of Debaltseve on Sunday, shattering a delicate truce and jeopardising hopes of a diplomatic solution to the conflict.
Guns fell silent across swathes of the front line at midnight on Saturday after Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatist leaders issued public ceasefire orders. Both sides reported an appreciable decline in intensity of fighting. Francois Hollande, the French president, who brokered the ceasefire deal in Minsk last week, said it was “generally satisfactory” despite some “local incidents”. But fighting continued near the port city of Mariupol in Donetsk region and there were reports that two civilians were killed by rockets in the town of Popasna in the Luhansk region.
In Debaltseve, the town encircled by separatists and described by the Ukraine army as “the main hot spot”, rebels warned that the truce “does not apply”.
A resumption of fighting at key flashpoints on Sunday made it clear that diplomatic efforts had managed to slow, but not stop, the war in the east.
Several thousand Ukrainian troops are believed to be holding out in the town, a key road and rail junction on the main road between Dontesk and Luhansk, the separatists’ two biggest strongholds.
Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said his forces would continue their offensive in Debaltseve. “We will cease fire with the exclusion of internal areas, that is to say Debaltseve,” he said. “There is not a single word about Debaltseve in the Minsk agreement. Kiev has betrayed thousands of soldiers there.”
Ominously, he went on to warn that any Ukrainian attempt to break out of or relieve the pocket would be considered a violation of the agreement -- laying the ground for a general unravelling of the entire peace deal.
Anatoliy Stelmakh, a Ukraine military spokesman, said the pro-Russian insurgents used “every kind of weapon, including Grad rockets” in Debaltseve. “The rebels tried to storm our positions three times,” he said, stressing that the Ukrainian forces were “only responding to attacks”.
Russian-backed forces launched an offensive to surround and capture the town last month. The fate of the garrison there is believed to have been one of the most acrimonious issues at marathon peace talks between Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Petro Poroshenko, his Ukrainian counterpart, in Minsk.
Access to Debaltseve was heavily restricted on Sunday. Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said troops loyal to Zakharchenko had denied them access.
The only way in and out for the Ukrainians is a pot-holed, 30-mile road running down a slender finger of Ukrainian-held territory south-east of the city of Artemivsk. It is a battered, ragged lifeline through frosted trees and barren winter fields, pockmarked with the scars of separatist attempts to close the road and burnt-out ambulances that did not make it back to the safety of Artemivsk.
About halfway down, army engineers have laid precarious steel stopgaps over a blown-up bridge.
Ukrainian control of the highway ends just past Luhanskoe, 10 miles north-west of Debaltseve. Three miles further on, separatist forces have cut the road at a hamlet called Logvinovo.
The village, which has changed hands several times in recent fighting, was apparently under heavy fire on Sunday.
Semen Semenchenko, the commander of the pro-Kiev Donbass volunteer battalion serving in the area, claimed that the Ukrainians had reopened access to Debaltseve by outflanking the town.
“We’ve opened a road parallel to the main highway, which they’ve cut at Logvinovo. Now they will try to take that route too,” he said, sketching a map showing separatist positions on either side of a narrow neck of land.
Poroshenko said in a televised meeting with his general staff on Saturday night that several lorries had reached Debaltseve using this route. Semenchenko, who has in the past been openly critical of the government and army high command, said he was confident the Ukrainians could hold the precarious position.
“It’s not like Illovaisk,” he said, referring to a disastrous encirclement of Ukrainian forces in September. “By now the general staff are much more competent and serious about addressing the situation. And if the separatists are massing their strength here, our forces are pretty serious too.”
But the route around the separatist lines, which cuts across back roads and fields, is extremely dangerous.
Ambulances taking wounded troops out of the encirclement under cover of darkness early Sunday came under fire at least three times, according to some of the soldiers on board.
Troops manning the last Ukrainian positions said fighting had eased, but that the current respite was merely a lull, not the end of the war.
“Those are our positions being hit,” said a soldier wearing a shoulder patch of the Berkut special police unit, as explosions a couple of miles to the east shook wooden outbuildings and sent earth trickling into nearby trenches.
“A cease fire is when no one is firing,” he said. “But compared with Sunday, which was awful, and the day before that, which was also awful, this is all right.”