AT LEAST 13 residents in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, were killed today when a bus was struck by an artillery shell.

The Ukrainian military has been bombarding the city regularly as part of its bid to crush anti-fascist resistance groups.

But Kiev’s troops were forced to retreat from the main terminal of Donetsk airport, where fierce fighting continues.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was hobnobbing with world leaders at the exclusive Davos summit in Switzerland.

He pleaded with International Monetary Fund (IMF) secretary-general Christine Lagarde for loans for Ukraine, which has been bankrupted by its aggressive military campaign against separatists and is deeply in debt to Russia.

But Ukraine’s communists warned that IMF loans always came with unacceptable strings attached.

Andrey Ivanov, secretary of the Lenin district committee in Kirovograd, said “predatory” reforms demanded by the IMF were responsible for the growing proportion of Ukrainians living in poverty.

The “anti-social 2015 budget” was removing benefits paid to some of the country’s most vulnerable people, he said — including veterans of the Afghan war and survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Mr Poroshenko told assembled dignitaries on Wednesday that “we are not merely fighting for our territorial integrity, we are fighting for European ­values.”

But his regime — installed by a violent coup last February backed by the European Union and United States — is propped up by openly neonazi militias and faces accusations of war crimes against civilians in the east.

Attempts to woo the West have been marred by blunders such as that of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who earlier this month sparked fury by claiming that the Soviet Union had invaded Germany and Ukraine in World War II.

Communist Party general secretary Petro Symonenko backed calls for a ceasefire but insisted that they must include disarmament of all armed gangs, including those of the far right being used by the government.

“We also need mandatory international guarantees for local communities to hold plebiscites and national referendums on the structure of the state and its adherence to international alliances.”