Kiev claims Russians' convoy hit

Russian solders with their several military vehicle gather at the rail road crossing about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Ukrainian border at  Rostov-on-Don region, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. The sigh reads "Customs control zone". (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)
Russian solders with their several military vehicle gather at the rail road crossing about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Ukrainian border at Rostov-on-Don region, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. The sigh reads "Customs control zone". (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

KAMENSK-SHAKHTINSKY, Russia -- NATO and Ukraine said Friday that a column of military vehicles crossed into Ukraine from Russia on Thursday night and that most of them had been destroyed by Ukrainian artillery fire.

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President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine said in a statement on his website Friday that he could confirm some Western news reports that a column had crossed into Ukraine and "the majority of the machines had been eliminated by Ukrainian artillery at night."

In Copenhagen, the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the alliance had detected an "incursion" of vehicles from Russia. The Kremlin denied that Friday.

In Washington, National Security Council spokesman Caitlin Hayden said the U.S. government is working to gather more information about the reports. She said the U.S. remains concerned about repeated Russian and Russian-supported incursions into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the convoy of more than 260 trucks that Russia said are filled with food and other aid for civilians caught up in the fighting in eastern Ukraine remained stalled Friday inside Russia because of confusion over when inspections would start.

Ukraine and its Western allies want to ensure the cargo contains only relief supplies and not items that could help pro-Russia fighters battling to survive a Ukrainian offensive.

A statement early Friday by the Ukrainian military said border guards had started examining the trucks, but the military's spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, later denied that and said inspections could not begin until Ukrainian authorities received documents detailing the trucks' contents.

Lysenko said Ukraine had sent border guards and customs officials to a Russian border town to examine the trucks but was still waiting for the necessary documentation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross, for its part, said Russia had yet to provide a detailed inventory and called for a speedy resolution of the problem.

In the interim, Red Cross staff members, representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and more than 50 Ukrainian border guards already on site had nothing to do.

In a statement issued in Geneva, the Red Cross said swift action was needed to allow "confirmation of the strictly humanitarian nature of the cargo."

"As and when agreement is reached, we plan to deliver this humanitarian aid to people affected by conflict in eastern Ukraine, health facilities and other welfare organizations," Laurent Corbaz, the Red Cross' head of operations for Europe and Central Asia, said during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. "People are struggling to cope with limited access to basic services such as water and electricity, so speed is of the essence."

At the camp where the trucks were parked overnight, Russian officials allowed journalists to inspect trucks of their choice for a second-straight day. None could say definitively when they would leave.

"A day, two days, two weeks, a month," said Boris Pashenko, a border service representative.

Sergei Karavaytsev of Russia's Ministry for Emergency Situations denied that the trucks in the convoy were from the military and said they were hired through private businesses.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu "guaranteed" Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Friday that no Russian troops are involved in the aid convoy.

In Kiev, Lysenko said an agreement had been reached to allow the inspection of the convoy, and the searches would start once the dispute over paperwork was resolved.

"Help is needed, and we accepted it," he said, adding that Ukrainian inspectors had already traveled to Donetsk, a small Russian town that has the same name as a separatist stronghold in eastern Ukraine, to begin their work. "But we can't start the procedure because we don't have documents."

The aid trucks were in a border zone close to several military bases, where columns of armored military vehicles driving in the direction of the Ukrainian border are a common sight. Two Western journalists reported seeing 23 armored vehicles crossing a border post into Ukraine on Thursday evening.

Unlike rebel-held military vehicles, which have been stripped of markings, the armored personnel carriers seen crossing the border bore full Russian identification, including license plates, according to journalists with British newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph who said they saw the vehicles cross the border.

Ukraine and the United States have accused Russia of covertly arming pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine.

On Friday, Germany said Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to Russian President Vladmir Putin ahead of a weekend meeting of foreign ministers aimed at easing tensions. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said Merkel urged Putin to de-escalate the situation "and in particular put an end to the flow of military goods, military advisers and armed personnel over the border into Ukraine."

Meanwhile, Russian news agencies quoted an unidentified border guard spokesman as saying that the border service, run by the FSB -- the successor agency to the KGB -- had deployed more mobile teams near the border. The spokesman said it was a response to increased infiltration by Ukrainian servicemen into Russia and more frequent shelling across the border.

He denied that any vehicles had crossed the border into Ukraine, calling such reports "completely untrue."

A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry also insisted that no Russian military vehicles were destroyed because none had crossed into Ukraine.

After Poroshenko announced the destruction of the military vehicles, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that it had received reports that Ukrainian forces planned to target its aid trucks once they entered Ukrainian territory.

"There are forces that are not simply bent on depriving the population of southeastern Ukraine of much-needed aid now, but also on carrying out an open provocation," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It said it had "received reports of direct threats to use force against our convoys," saying a pro-Kiev volunteer battalion planned to mine stretches of the road that runs between the Russian border and the rebel-held city of Luhansk, the aid convoy's final destination.

"Those who harbor such criminal plans are taking on a huge responsibility for the consequences," the statement said.

Rebels control most of the territory between the border crossing and Luhansk, but the Ukrainian military said Thursday that it had retaken a key town abutting the main transit highway in the area.

The fighting in eastern Ukraine has claimed nearly 2,100 lives, half of those in the past few weeks as the Ukrainian troops regained more and more rebel-held territory. The fighting began in April, a month after Russia annexed Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

The eastern city of Luhansk has suffered extensively from an intense military barrage over the past few weeks. The city remains cut off from power and water supplies, and its mobile and landline telephone systems barely function, local authorities said Friday. Little food is available but bread is still being made using portable generators.

Ukraine on Friday proceeded with its own aid mission to the Luhansk area. Trucks sent from the eastern city of Kharkiv were unloaded Friday at warehouses in the town of Starobilsk, where the goods were to be sorted and transported farther by the Red Cross. Starobilsk is 60 miles north of Luhansk.

Other Ukrainian aid was taken to the town of Lysychansk, which was retaken by Ukrainian forces late last month but has seen sporadic clashes until earlier this week.

As Ukrainian emergency workers discussed how to distribute the aid Friday, clusters of older women and small children began appearing on the town's streets. The residents said the aid was the first they had seen since fighting had ended.

Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Roth, Andrew Higgins and Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times; by Michael Birnbaum and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post; and by Alexander Roslyakov, Jim Heintz, Peter Leonard, Vitnija Saldava, Lynn Berry, Vladimir Isachenkov, Karl Ritter, Geir Moulson, Danica Kirka and Pan Pylas of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/16/2014

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