Ukraine’s parliament voted yesterday to resume partial conscription, approving presidential decrees imposing three waves of army call-ups.

Security officials claim a massive military mobilisation is necessary to crush anti-fascist resistance forces in eastern Ukraine, which Kiev asserts are controlled by ­Russia.

“Russian aggression is continuing. There has been a significant surge in the intensity of firing,” National Defence Council secretary Oleksandr Turchynov told MPs.

The first round of call-ups will begin on Tuesday and last 90 days. Officials did not say how many people they intended to conscript.

Kiev’s drive towards military victory rather than negotiations with the rebels, who took up arms following last year’s fascist-backed coup in the capital, is likely to further derail a ­tentative ceasefire signed in Minsk last autumn.

Ukraine marked a day of mourning for 13 civilians killed in an attack on a bus on Tuesday.

Both sides in the country’s civil war have blamed the other for the atrocity, while Russia suggested that the bus may have hit a landmine.

Monitors for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said that a team composed of Ukrainian, Russian and resistance representatives would jointly investigate.

The Communist Party of Ukraine warned yesterday that there was no military solution to the country’s problems.

“The cause of the crisis must be sought in the vicious nature of the clan-oligarchic system, formed over more than two decades of so-called market reforms,” leader Petro Symonenko said.

“How can you speak of reforms in the interests of the people when public property is handed to a narrow circle in illegal and sometimes openly criminal privatisation?

“This model led to (the ­fascist-backed movement) Maidan, civil war and put the country under the control of Western moneylenders.

“Ukraine remains the most corrupt state in Europe.”

The Communist Party was subject to harsh persecution by the new Kiev regime because it was the only force speaking up for working people, he argued, calling for “a new revolution” that would see “the nationalisation of strategic enterprises and strengthening the state’s social obligations.”