Ten Ukraine civilians killed when rocket hits bus
The incident marked one of the deadliest attacks on civilians
DONETSK (AFP) - Ten Ukrainian civilians were killed and more than a dozen wounded on Tuesday when a long-range Grad rocket apparently fired by pro-Russian insurgents hit an intercity bus.
Local police said the rocket appeared to have gone astray after being fired by the gunmen at a checkpoint set up by government soldiers on the main highway connecting the rebel stronghold of Donetsk with Ukraine s southeastern coast on the Sea of Azov.
The incident marked one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since the rival sides signed a much-maligned September 5 truce that only partially stemmed the fighting in the east and did little to resolve the insurgents independence claims.
Tuesday s strike also damaged Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko s efforts to set up a peace summit where his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin could personally sign a truce to try to end the nine-month war in the former Soviet republic.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- the West s main mediator in Europe s deadliest conflict since the Balkan wars of the 1990s -- argues that such a meeting would be premature with daily violence still raging across Ukraine s industrial east.
Diplomatic talks in Berlin on Monday confirmed that no summit would be held on the crisis in the short term.
Both Ukrainian military and regional police officials told AFP that the death toll from Tuesday s incident included six women and four men.
Officials said 13 others had been hospitalised near the town of Volnovakha where the bus was hit 35 kilometres (22 miles) southwest of Donetsk.
Donetsk regional interior ministry department chief Vyacheslav Abroskin said the rocket appeared to have gone astray after being fired at a road block.
"It was a direct hit on an intercity bus," Abroskin said.
"An investigation is in progress. The road between Donetsk and Mariupol has been closed," he said in reference to a strategic port city controlled by Ukrainian forces on the Sea of Azov.
Both separatist leaders and military commanders rejected the charges the rebels were to blame.
"I very much doubt that we could have hit anything as far away as Volnovakha from our positions," Donetsk separatist co-leader Andrei Purgin told AFP by telephone.
"You can see on the map that it is very far away from our nearest roadblock."
Donetsk deputy separatist forces commander Eduard Basurin also denied rebel involvement.
"No one fired at anything," he told Russia s RIA Novosti state news agency.
The insurgents and Kiev frequently blame each other for stray rocket and artillery fire that kills and wounds civilians on an almost daily basis.
Kiev earlier reported the death of three civilians and a soldier in the past day of fighting.
Delayed peace talks
The latest casualties were reported after the foreign ministers of Germany and France failed to help their counterparts from Moscow and Kiev bridge differences over ways to end a conflict that has claimed more than 4,700 lives.
Kiev accuses the Kremlin of arming the insurgents and refusing to withdraw its own troops from the eastern war zone -- soldiers Moscow denies having ever sent.
The Kremlin counters that the pro-European leaders in Kiev who came to power after the ouster of a Moscow-backed administration last February are persecuting ethnic Russians who shared a Soviet-era mistrust of the West.
Putin denies any involvement in the conflict and has shied away from playing a direct role in mediation talks.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said an international summit involving both Poroshenko and Putin would now require more preparations and talks with pro-Russian rebels.
Donetsk -- a once bustling city of nearly one million people that now stands half empty and suffering chronic power and water shortages -- has been the target of especially heavy rocket and artillery fire in the past week.
Kiev accuses the rebels of escalating their strikes in order to undermine the chances of Russia agreeing to a settlement that preserves Ukraine s eastern border.
