New York Times
January 17, 2015
MOSCOW — Leaders of a Russian-backed rebel movement in eastern Ukraine claimed on Friday to have captured the Donetsk city airport, a symbolically important and long-sought prize, although central government officials denied this was the case.
A senior leader for the rebels, the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, described the fight as the start of a new offensive to push Ukraine out of the east.
Despite a cease-fire that was signed on Sept. 5, the sides have fought in the rubble of the airport terminals for months. The rebels have repeatedly claimed to have captured the site, even though Ukrainian forces have been able to hold onto pockets inside the terminal. A major escalation in shelling preceded the latest claim.
If the claim is true, it would signal the first significant territorial advance by the rebels since the signing of the cease-fire pact.
That cease-fire broke down almost immediately, with daily violations. Neither side has been able to claim additional territory since the cease-fire was signed, often making it impossible to ascertain who had started a skirmish or why. An advance, by contrast, would suggest an incontrovertible violation.
It was unclear, as with so many other of the pro-Russian rebel leadership’s actions, whether the Russian authorities had condoned the advance; last fall, German officials had reportedly warned that the capture of the airport would provoke additional sanctions on Russia’s economy, which is struggling.
In an online statement Friday, the military authorities for the Donetsk People’s Republic said that “today, we can speak about control over the territory of Donetsk airport and its surroundings.”
A video posted by the Russian news media showed a rebel flag flying over the ruins of the hulking, glass-and-steel main terminal of Sergei Prokofiev International Airport. The air-traffic control tower collapsed this week, in a sign of the intensity of the artillery fire striking the site.
Despite the claims, the statement conceded that Ukrainian forces remained on airport territory. “There are still about 10 Ukrainian soldiers left in the new terminal, but they have ceased to offer resistance,” it said.
The leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, said on Thursday after a conference with Ukrainian Army officers about the airport that he intended to press an offensive and recapture territory lost to government forces. That territory lies outside the partially demarcated line of control established in the Sept. 5 agreement.
“They are on territory which they do not control and will never be under their control,” Mr. Zakharchenko said of the Ukrainian Army, in remarks later posted online.
“We will go further, to Slovyansk, to Kramatorsk, and so on,” he said, referring to Ukrainian-controlled towns now far from the front.
Ukrainian officials acknowledged the intensification of the assault on the airport but denied that they had lost control of what has been the central government’s toehold in the rebel capital, Donetsk. “Our guys are still defending it,” Denis Ermak, a military analyst with the Dnipro-1 battalion, said in a telephone interview.
UKRAINE CRISIS IN MAPS
The latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
The battle for airport ruins is a harrowing, close-quarter fight that has stretched on for months.
The main terminal, built for the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, is a battered and booby-trapped wreck where rebel fighters control the third floor and above.
Ukrainian forces hold the first and second floors, and access to subterranean tunnels originally laid for communications cables.
The rebel forces are aided, if not led, by Russian special forces, in the Ukrainian view, a charge that Russia denies.
Mr. Ermak said that the Russian-backed side has now seized a surface-level supply route into the terminal building and raised a flag over it, while not actually controlling it. The Ukrainian Army can still supply those inside the building through the tunnels, he said, but the defense of the airport is becoming more tenuous by the day.
“They fight through holes in the floor, with booby traps, by blowing up walls and in the stairwells,” he said of the combat in the building. “The situation is difficult. They want to show the world they have taken the airport, but they have not. Our guys are still defending it. Every day and every night there are attacks.”
In the past three days, the separatists have also deployed a new weapon not seen openly before in eastern Ukraine, called the Buratino, or the Pinocchio, which fires powerful thermobaric, or “vacuum bomb,” rockets from a tank chassis. Only Russia could have provided them this weapon, Mr. Ermak said. Russia has denied providing any weapons to the east.
A report posted on Thursday by LifeNews, a Russian news agency with a strong pro-rebel slant, showed separatist fighters moving amid the rubble of the airport’s new terminal, firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in what the report called a “sweep” to flush out the final Ukrainian holdouts.
At least one rebel front-line commander on Friday conceded that the airport was not yet captured, but he said that it would be soon. “Another day or two and the airport will be ours,” the rebel commander, who uses the nickname Zhora, said in a telephone interview.
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