by Our Foreign Desk

INTENSIFIED fighting in eastern Ukraine threatened to derail a shaky ceasefire agreement yesterday, with dozens killed and injured in shelling.

Kiev forces traded artillery fire with anti-fascist militias in Donetsk and Lugansk. Both sides blamed the other for initiating the latest wave of fighting.

Donbass armed forces chief Vladimir Kononov said that 15 people had been killed in Donetsk, including anti-fascist militia members and civilians.

“The Ukrainian side has carried out a provocation and started shelling our positions all along the front,” he said.

Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said rebels mounted a major artillery barrage early in the morning against Kiev-held suburbs to the west of Donetsk.

“The enemy is trying to advance. Ukrainian troops are repelling all attacks and successfully holding onto their positions,” Mr Lysenko said.

But Donbass anti-fascist military spokesman Eduard Basurin denied that his forces were on the offensive, instead saying that Kiev forces were voluntarily abandoning their position.

Most of yesterday’s casualties were civilians. Donetsk trauma centre chief physician Alexander Oprishchenko said his hospital had admitted 60 wounded people for treatment yesterday, of whom five were in a grave condition.

Kiev-appointed Lugansk governor Hennadiy Moskal said on his website that an elderly couple had died when their car was struck by a mortar yesterday morning, 12 miles inside government-occupied territory.

A Donbass official said that one resident in the town of Yenakieve had been killed near a waste treatment plant during a 20-minute barrage.

Negotiators from both sides met for talks in Belarus on Tuesday, but the session ended without obvious progress.

Meanwhile, two mines in Donbass were hit by power cuts following artillery shelling, trapping 379 miners underground, according to Mr Basurin.