Ukraine Plays Down Significance of Destruction of Russian Military Convoy Sunday August 17th, 2014 at 9:57 AM
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Updated Aug. 16, 2014 6:03 p.m. ET
Russian military vehicles drive along the road outside Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Russia, on Saturday.Reuters
Ukraine and Russia on Saturday appeared to be seeking to avoid a broader confrontation in the wake of Kiev's claim it destroyed most of a Russian military convoy that entered its territory, as theEuropean Union intensified its efforts to bring the two countries to the negotiating table.
Col. Andriy Lysenko, the Ukrainian government's security spokesman, said Saturday that Ukrainian artillery had destroyed most of a Russian column of military vehicles that entered the country earlier in the week. But he described the episode as a commonplace incident, refused to release further details and gave no indication that it marked the start of a more direct military engagement between Russia and Ukraine.
"This was a traditional route of movement of armored convoys to the territory of Ukraine, and the Ukraine military were able to destroy most of those convoys," Col. Lysenko said.
(Ukraine crisis: Rebels shoot down fighter jet.)
No photographs have surfaced of the aftermath of the attack, which Russia's Defense Ministry dismissed on Friday as "some kind of fantasy." The claim, marking the most direct and publicized military clash between Russia and Ukraine since the conflict began, jolted global markets Friday.
Western officials slammed the apparent incursion but some played down the significance of the incident, noting that military equipment was believed to have been flowing over the border to pro-Russia separatists for months. Col. Lysenko's comments backed up the idea that the incident didn't represent a military turning point in the conflict.
European leaders intensified efforts on Saturday to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table, trying to calm a crisis that has escalated since the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 last month. Finnish President Sauli Niinisto shuttled to Kiev to meet with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko after sitting down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia. French President François Hollande called for calm after consulting with European Commission President José Manuel Barroso ahead of a meeting of the Ukrainian, Russian, French and German foreign ministers in Berlin on Sunday.
"Mr. Hollande repeated that Russia must commit to respecting Ukraine's territorial integrity and called on Ukraine to show restraint and discernment in the ongoing military operations against the separatists," the French president's office said in a statement. "It is necessary to re-create the conditions for and resume a meaningful political process."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday called on Moscow to respond to reports that tanks and troops had crossed from Russia into Ukraine. Ms. Merkel spoke on the phone with Mr. Poroshenko, and the two said arms deliveries from Russian territory to pro-Russia rebels in Ukraine should stop.
Kiev and the rebels gave conflicting accounts of the situation in eastern Ukraine, where government forces have tried to encircle the main separatist strongholds, the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Col. Lysenko said rebels in those cities were losing faith and trying to sneak out wearing civilian clothes.
But Alexander Zakharchenko, the new leader of the rebel government known as the Donetsk People's Republic, said in a video posted online that his forces had been reinforced recently with 1,200 servicemen who had trained at a camp in Russia for four months. He said the rebels had also gathered 150 armored vehicles, including about 30 tanks. In a later video interview with Russia's LifeNews website, Mr. Zakharchenko said the equipment had been left behind by Ukraine's military, not sent by Russia.
"The Ukrainian forces have left us so much military equipment that we don't even have enough time to form the crews," Mr. Zakharchenko said.
In Russia, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Russia and Ukraine have reached an agreement on how to process the convoy of nearly 300 trucks carrying Russian aid, which is parked in a field several miles from the border.
After five hours of talks, a Red Cross official said both sides had agreed how to proceed "in terms of clearing, inspecting and preparing the convoy" to eventually bring the goods into eastern Ukraine.
"At this stage, the technical, and fiscal, and paperwork procedures are all cleared," said Pascal Cuttat, head of regional delegation of ICRC for Russia, Belarus and Moldova.
But it is unclear when the convoy will set off. Mr. Cuttat said the Red Cross was waiting for security guarantees from all sides, and Ukraine is yet to inspect the goods in the vehicles and give its approval for them to be delivered.
The atmosphere was still tense at the Ukrainian border near the southwest Russian town of Donetsk—which has the same name as the Ukrainian rebel stronghold.
Military activities continued on the Russian side next to the border with Ukraine. A column of 11 vehicles with caterpillar treads stood with engines running on the road to the Ukranian border late Saturday.
Another column of some 20 vehicles, also with caterpillar treads, was seen about 25 miles from the Ukrainian border, on the federal highway from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don. Men dressed in military-style clothes were riding on top of the vehicles, some of them waving hands as people along the highway were shooting videos on their smartphones.
The insignia on the men's uniforms couldn't be seen in the dark.
At one point Saturday afternoon, blasts could be heard apparently coming from the Ukrainian side of the border. Soon an ambulance with Russian license plates drove through the border checkpoint toward Ukraine. An official with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has been monitoring the checkpoint, said the blasts could have been artillery rounds.
"This has been going on for the past days and weeks," said the official, Paul Picard. "It was more quiet here recently."
Mr. Picard said the OSCE had observed groups of young men in military-style dress crossing back and forth across the border in the past two weeks.
"Some of them have backpacks but we have never seen weapons," Mr. Picard said. "They are going in both directions. It happens randomly, but on a regular basis."
—James Marson and Inti Landauro contributed to this article.
Write to Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com and Andrey Ostroukh atandrey.ostroukh@wsj.com
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Ukraine, previously a place most foreigners happily ignored, has forced itself on the world's attention this year.
The fact that Vladimir Putin stole Crimea would have been enough on its own. It was the first annexation in Europe since the second world war and cast Russia's relations with the west into crisis. Then came Russian intervention in the east of the country, Ukraine shelling rebel cities, and the downing of MH17: horrific images of bodies lying among the sunflowers and an unseemly squabble over access to the site.
Rocket attacks and death have gone from being unimaginable to routine in a matter of weeks. Even for people who have been writing about Ukraine for years, it is hard to comprehend how one of the most lazy, lovely and laid-back countries in the old Soviet Union fell so far, so fast.
Few things summed up the old Ukraine – a place of kind people, corrupt policemen, incompetent officials, unexpected survivals from the USSR – more perfectly than Andrey Kurkov's novels. Death and the Penguin, a surreal account of what happens when a Kiev obituary writer adopts a penguin from a bankrupt zoo, is his most famous book, but his whole series is a rewarding glimpse into post-Soviet Ukraine.
Now he has published diaries covering the period of the revolution. They seamlessly mix the everyday and the seminal and provide a fascinating guide to how Ukraine has found itself where it is.
Kurkov is a strange Ukrainian. He was born in Russia, speaks Russian as a first language and writes in Russian. Putin has described Ukraine's revolution as one led by fascists inspired by hatred of all things Russian, so Kurkov is a particularly valuable guide for anyone seeking a more nuanced explanation of why so many people took against ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and the system he created.
"I am a Russian myself, after all, an ethnically Russian citizen of Ukraine. But I am not 'a Russian', because I have nothing in common with Russia and its politics. I do not have Russian citizenship and I do not want it," he wrote in January, on seeing the first stirrings of the Crimean separatism that eventually led to the peninsula's annexation.
Kurkov's version of events is one that has not gained enough traction in western media, which simplify this complex tale for an audience distracted by all the other stories of the day. For him, the revolution is about corruption, about a government looting its own country, about people's desire to live with dignity in a country governed by rules, not people, to be free to decide their own destiny.
"If everyone accepts the rules, the poor police officer will find himself bound by them as well. If we don't accept them, he will maintain the right to take ice-creams for his children from the local kiosk without paying for them. And so the kiosk owner's children will grow up hating the police officer," he wrote on 25 November 2013, less than a week after Yanukovych rejected closer ties with the European Union and the first protesters emerged on to the Maidan in central Kiev.
Yanukovych built a pyramid of kickbacks so efficiently that his son, a dentist, became the third-richest man in the country in just three years. He was not giving up his system without a fight and police moved in to disperse the protesters. That brought new protesters and a demonstration became an uprising.
It was an uprising without leaders, despite opposition politicians' attempts to put themselves at its head. Spontaneous groups sprang up to provide food, healthcare, bedding and clothes. People living near the Maidan removed their Wi-Fi passwords to give the protesters access to the internet. Protesters pulled down the statue of Lenin and tried to change the country from the streets up.
Yanukovych and Putin struggled to respond to a kind of politics neither of them understood. They eventually settled on a deal for cheaper gas, believing wrongly that ordinary Ukrainians could be bought off as easily as their leaders.
"One wonders what else will become cheaper thanks to Putin's goodwill. Human life here already has an aspect so low that it could hardly fall any further," wrote Kurkov on 17 December.
There are signs that this is not quite the unedited diary it claims to be. He spells out concepts and movements unfamiliar to a western audience in a way no diarist would need to. Nonetheless, it does not feel like he is writing for effect or posterity. These are the genuine musings of a man who doesn't realise quite how important what he is witnessing will become. He never joined the crowd throwing petrol bombs at the police, but is a sympathetic observer. He understood why the revolution was happening.
Andrey Kurkov, above, strolls through the protest camps, and describes the revolutionaries sitting around campfires. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe
The diary is not all politics. Kurkov writes about his children, about writer's block, about his trips to the sauna, his holidays and his speaking engagements. He strolls through the protest camps and describes the revolutionaries sitting around campfires sharing stories and gossip. The prose is charming: his ideas at one point are "clumsy as a tortoise".
Nonetheless, his thoughts keep coming back to the fate of his country, which he depicts clearly and simply: the annexation of Crimea, the dismembering of the east, chaos in Kiev. By the time Yanukovych fled in February, the whole country was convulsed with politics; every conversation was about the fate of the nation.
Ukraine, Kurkov writes, needs a period of calm to rebuild itself, to change its laws and to prosecute the wrongdoers. But that is something Putin will not give it. Yanukovych's form of government was modelled on Putin's, and the Kremlin cannot allow a revolution to upend such a system and form a stable, democratic state instead.
Ukraine Diaries is a book that was out of date before it was even published. Ukraine has moved a long way this year and has continued to do so since this book went to the printers. It has new laws against corruption, a better if imperfect government and a clearer sense of itself as a nation. But that has come at the cost of hundreds of lives. The death toll increases daily and shows no signs of abating.
I am glad Kurkov will be at the centre of the events as they unfold, ready to distil both tragedy and delight into his pithy, humane prose. The best way to oppose the waves of propaganda pouring over Ukraine is by telling the truth, so I hope this book will have a sequel.
Ukraine Diaries: Disptaches from Kiev is published by Harvill Secker (£9.99). Click here to buy it for £7.99 with free UK p&p. Oliver Bullough is Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting
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Pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP
Pro-Russia rebels shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet on Sunday, before Kiev and Moscow's top diplomats were due to hold urgent talks to defuse tensions over fighting in the east of the ex-Soviet nation.
Ukraine's military said its MiG-29 warplane had been shot down as it carried out "an assignment to eliminate a large group of terrorists" in the Luhansk region. The pilot managed to parachute to safety, it said.
Authorities in the main rebel city of Donetsk said shelling had killed 10 civilians in 24 hours as government forces pressed on with an offensive to oust separatists.
Meanwhile, Germany demanded that Moscow clarify boasts by a rebel leader in the besieged city that he had recently received hundreds of fighters trained in Russia to bolster the flagging rebellion.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine's foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, and their French and German counterparts are due to meet in Berlin.
Klimkin tweeted: "Flying to Berlin. The talks will not be easy. It is important to stop the flow of weapons and mercenaries from Russia."
The French president, François Hollande, called for Ukraine to show "restraint and good judgment" in its military operations, after boasts by Kiev that it had destroyed part of a small military convoy from Russia. He suggested the talks could pave the way for a face-to-face encounter between the Russian and Ukrainian heads of state.
Russia had dismissed the incursion claims as "fantasies", but resisted the urge to strike back, as it again denied the persistent allegations from the west that it is arming the rebels.
The fate of a Russian aid convoy parked up near the border since Thursday remained uncertain despite both sides appearing to edge closer to a deal to let it into Ukraine.
The Red Cross said its officials had arrived at an area where 300 Russian trucks were waiting, but official inspections of the cargo were yet to begin. AFP journalists later saw a group of 16 trucks head in the direction of the crossing.
The west and Kiev fear that the convoy could be a Trojan horse to help the rebels in eastern Ukraine, or provide Moscow with an excuse to send in the 20,000 troops that Nato says it has massed on the border.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is overseeing the aid delivery, has said Russia and Ukraine have agreed on procedures to check the cargo, but "security guarantees" are still needed on how the vehicles can cross rebel-held territory.
Kiev recognised the "legality" of the humanitarian convoy in a statement published on the government website, moving closer to giving the green light for the trucks to enter its territory.
Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, told the US vice-president, Joe Biden, on Saturday that the separatists had yet to grant safe passage for the aid.
Russia's foreign ministry has repeatedly demanded that Kiev cease fire in order for the aid to reach residents of blighted cities in eastern Ukraine who have been stuck for days without water or power.
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The Germans are spies like us.
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency reportedly eavesdropped on calls made by Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as his predecessor, Hillary Clinton.
The magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday that the agency, BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry had in 2013 as part of a broader surveillance dragnet of telecommunications in the Middle East.
The spy agency also recorded a call between Clinton and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2012, the magazine said.
Der Spiegel — which has broken several stories tied to Edward Snowden’s leaks of top-secret National Security Agency documents — said the surveillance was conducted accidentally and that the three diplomats were not intentionally targeted. The recordings were destroyed once German officials realized just whom they had spied on, according to the magazine.
Clinton’s call was tapped because it was on the same “frequency” as a terror suspect, Der Spiegel reported.
“Any accidental recordings are deleted immediately,” a BND spokeswoman told Reuters.
It was unclear if the recordings of Kerry’s calls would have yielded useful intelligence, anyway. Germany’s Bild newspaper quoted a Secret Service employee as saying that Kerry’s phone calls are encrypted like President Obama’s, and that it would be “impressive” if the BND had been able to crack the secured line.
The revelations were an ironic embarrassment for the German government, which has repeatedly expressed outrage at reports of the NSA spying on its communications — including those of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The diplomatic row escalated last month when two German government staffers were accused of being U.S. spies, prompting Merkel to expel the top CIA officer stationed in the country. Observers said the discovery of the two spies was a sign Germany had ramped up its efforts to uncover American snooping following the Snowden revelations.
Merkel reportedly even went so far as to compare the NSA’s spying with the Stasi, the all-encompassing secret police of East Germany, in a furious conversation with Obama in 2013.
A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Berlin and the State Department both declined to comment. Obama has pledged to rein in spying on close American allies, while also saying that all governments spy on each other.
Reports of NSA spying on other nations have also strained America’s diplomatic relationships with Brazil and China, among others.
With News Wire Services
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KIEV/DONETSK Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukrainian forces have raised their national flag over a police station in the city of Luhansk which was for months under rebel control, Kiev said on Sunday, in what could be a breakthrough in Ukraine's efforts to crush pro-Moscow separatists.
Ukrainian officials allege though that the rebels are fighting a desperate rearguard action to hold on to Luhansk -- which is their supply route into neighboring Russia -- and say the flow of weapons and fighters from Russia has accelerated.
The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia were preparing to meet for talks on the conflict in Berlin on Sunday, though it seemed likely that the diplomacy could be overshadowed by fast-moving developments on the battlefield.
Russia denies helping the rebels and accuses Kiev, backed by the West, of triggering a humanitarian crisis through indiscriminate use of force against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who reject the Ukrainian government's rule.
Andriy Lysenko, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said government forces fought separatists in a neighborhood of Luhansk city on Saturday and took control of the Zhovtneviy neighborhood police station.
"They raised the state flag over it," Lysenko told a news briefing.
Separatist officials in Luhansk could not be reached by telephone, and a separatist spokeswoman in Donetsk, the other rebel strong-hold in eastern Ukraine, said she did not know what had happened in Luhansk.
A photograph posted on Twitter appeared to show a Ukrainian flag on the front of the police station, but it could not be independently verified. pic.twitter.com/fhzEPyUpMp
If confirmed, the taking of the police station is significant because the city of Luhansk has for several months been a rebel redoubt where Kiev's writ has not run.
Ukrainian troops have been closing in on the city from the outskirts, but had not previously been able to get forces inside the city limits. The separatists still control sections of the border linking Luhansk region to Russia.
The four-month-old conflict in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east has reached a critical phase, with Kiev and Western governments watching nervously to see if Russia will intervene in support of the increasingly besieged rebels.
The rebels have responded to the reverses with defiant rhetoric, and the fighting continues.
Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday that the separatists shot down a Ukrainian warplane. The pilot ejected and was located and recovered after a search, a military spokesman, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, told Reuters.
On Saturday, Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said rebels were in the process of receiving some 150 armored vehicles, including 30 tanks, and 1,200 fighters trained in Russia. He said they planned to launch a major counter-offensive.
"They are joining at the most crucial moment," he said in a video recorded on Friday.
The assertion that the fighters were trained in Russia is awkward for Moscow, which has repeatedly denied allegations from Kiev and its Western allies that it is providing material support to separatist fighters.
CRITICAL PHASE
In a sign of concern at the latest rebel comments, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko agreed in a phone call on Saturday that deliveries of weapons to separatists in Ukraine must stop and a ceasefire must be achieved, a German government spokesman said.
The Ukraine crisis has dragged relations between Russia and the West to their lowest point since the Cold War and set off a round of trade restrictions that are hurting struggling economies in both Russia and Europe.
Adding to the tensions, Russia and Ukraine have been at loggerheads for days over a convoy of 280 Russian trucks carrying water, food and medicine.
It was despatched by Moscow bound for eastern Ukraine but has been parked up for several days in Russia near the border.
Kiev has said the convoy could be a Trojan Horse for Russia to get weapons to the rebels, a notion that Moscow has dismissed as absurd. It said the aid is desperately needed by civilians left without water and power and under constant bombardment from the Ukrainian advance.
After days of wrangling between Kiev and Moscow, there were signs of movement on Sunday.
Sixteen trucks separated from the main convoy and drove into a Russian bus depot near a border crossing into Ukraine, a Reuters cameraman said from the scene.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said in Geneva that Russian and Ukrainian border guards and customs officials had agreed that the cargo could be inspected.
REBEL ROUT?
Ukrainian officials have painted a picture of a separatist force that is on the run and starting to panic - though rebel fighters Reuters reporters have spoken to in Donetsk say they are determined to stand firm.
The Ukrainian National Guard said its forces had seized a rebel field commander from Luhansk region as well as 13 others suspected of “terrorist activity”.
“The terrorists are putting on ordinary clothes, taking only their passport with them and are trying to pass themselves off as ordinary peaceful citizens on public transport to try to get through the Ukrainian checkpoints,” the National Guard said.
In the past week, three senior rebel leaders have been removed from their posts, pointing to mounting disagreement over how to turn the tide of the fighting back in their favor.
The fighting has taken a heavy human toll.
The United Nations said this month that an estimated 2,086 people, including civilians and combatants, had been killed in the conflict. That figure nearly doubled since the end of July, when Ukrainian forces stepped up their offensive and fighting started in urban areas.
In Donetsk which like Luhansk is now ringed by Kiev's forces, artillery fire has struck apartment buildings, killing and wounding residents, according to Reuters reporters. Officials in Kiev deny they are firing heavy weapons at residential areas.
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- Donetsk PM claims the troops have spent months training in Russia
- Claim comes after Ukraine claimed it destroyed armoured column yesterday
- Kremlin dismisses the report as 'fantasy' and Ukraine declines to give details
Published: 15:40 GMT, 16 August 2014 | Updated: 13:09 GMT, 17 August 2014
This is the shocking moment Ukrainian troops were pictured beating a man with an assault rifle after accusing him of being a pro-Russian spy.
The image emerged as a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine has claimed that a whole armoured column of reinforcements is coming to his aid from Russia.
Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said he was expecting 150 armoured vehicles and 1,200 fighters to cross the border.
In a video posted on a rebel website, he said the troops had spent four months training in Russia, a contradiction of Kremlin claims it has not materially supported Ukraine's rebels.
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Beating: Ukranian troops detain a man accused of being of being a pro-Russian at a checkpoint near Debaltseve, Donetsk region
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One man, who appears to be wearing a towel, is detained by Ukrainian soldiers who suspect him of spying for pro-Russian militants at a checkpoint near Debaltseve, Donetsk
It comes after Ukraine's government claimed its forces yesterday partially destroyed an armoured column that had crossed the border from the east.
Reports of the attack sparked fears that Russia could be drawn into open war with the new Western-backed government in Kiev, but Moscow dismissed the claims as 'fantasy' and made no threat of retaliation.
Reuters reports that, on the contrary, the conflict in eastern Ukraine had today returned to the pattern it has been following for several weeks.
Kiev said military equipment was entering from Russia, and the rebels said they had attacked Ukrainian troops.
A Reuters reporter in Donetsk, one of two rebel strongholds in the east, said the sound of explosions was audible in the city centre.
The conflict in Ukraine has dragged relations between Russia and the West to their worst since the Cold War and set off a round of trade restrictions that are hurting struggling economies both in Russia and Europe.
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Hopeful: The prime minister of Ukraine's self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic Alexander Zakharchenko who has claimed he is expecting an armoured column of 250 vehicles and 1,200 men to come to his aid
The United Nations said this week that an estimated 2,086 people had died in the Ukraine conflict, with nearly 5,000 wounded.
A rebel news outlet said on Saturday that separatist fighters had killed 30 members of a Ukrainian government battalion in fighting in Luhansk province, a rebel-held area of eastern Ukraine adjacent to the Russian border.
Rebels said two villages south of Donetsk, the other separatist stronghold, were bombed overnight with mortars and rebel news outlet Novorossiya also said two neighbourhoods of the city itself had been hit with artillery.
A Ukrainian defence ministry spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, contradicted the rebel assertions. He said three Ukrainian servicemen had been killed over the past 24 hours, and denied Kiev's forces were firing artillery on Donetsk.
In the past few hours Ukrainian security forces had spotted Russian drones and a helicopter crossing illegally into Ukraine's airspace, Lysenko told a news briefing.
He declined to give further details on the alleged incident on Friday in which Kiev said it attacked armoured vehicles that arrived from Russia.
Ukraine has not made clear if the vehicles were manned by Russian soldiers or separatist irregulars.
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A rebel-controlled 122-mm self-propelled howitzer moves along a street in Donetsk: Ukraine's government has claimed its forces yesterday partially destroyed an armoured column that was coming from across the border
Ukraine and its Western allies say Russia broke international law by annexing Ukraine's Crimea region earlier this year, and that Moscow is now arming the Ukrainian separatists.
Russia accuses Kiev of waging a criminal war against Russian-speaking civilians in the east.
Each side rejects the other's allegations.
Now it seems that the momentum in the conflict on the ground is with the Ukrainian forces.
They have pushed the separatists out of large swathes of territory and have now nearly encircled them in Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev says it now controls the road linking the two cities.
Russia says the Ukrainian offensive is causing a humanitarian catastrophe for the civilian population in the two cities. It accuses Kiev's forces of indiscriminately using heavy weapons in residential areas, an allegation Ukraine denies.
In the past seven days, three of the most senior rebel leaders have been removed from their posts, pointing to mounting disagreement over how to turn the tide of the fighting back in their favour.
Mr Lysenko, the Ukrainian military spokesman, said he had reports of rebel fighters abandoning their posts in Luhansk, and preparing to leave Donetsk and seek safe haven in Russia.
'A mood of panic is spreading and rebels are trying to leave through the small gaps that remain,' he said.
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