KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's president dissolved the nation's parliament Monday and called for early elections in October as his country continues to battle a pro-Russia insurgency in its eastern regions.
In a statement on his website, President Petro Poroshenko said elections would be held Oct. 26.
Meanwhile Monday, a Ukrainian official said a column of Russian tanks and armored vehicles entered southeastern Ukraine -- a move that takes the conflict to an area that has so far escaped the intense fighting of recent weeks.
Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's National Security Council, told reporters that the column of 10 tanks, two armored vehicles and two trucks crossed the border near the village of Shcherbak and that shells were fired from Russia toward the nearby city of Novoazovsk. He said they were Russian military vehicles bearing the flags of the separatist Donetsk rebels. The village is in the Donetsk region but not under the control of the rebels.
The Ukrainian National Guard later said two of the tanks had been destroyed.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he had no information about the episode and accused Ukraine of providing "a lot of disinformation about our invasions."
Meanwhile, Poroshenko said the dissolution of the parliament, which was prefigured by the breakup of the majority coalition last month, was in line with "the expectations of the vast majority of the citizens of Ukraine" and called it a move toward "cleansing" the parliament.
Many members of the parliament "are allies of the militants-separatists," Poroshenko said, referring to the pro-Russia rebels who have battled government troops in the country's east since April.
The Party of Regions, which is backed by much of the country's industrial, Russian-speaking east and was supported by pro-Russia ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, was the largest party in the parliament before Yanukovych fled the country in the wake of protests in February, and the party still has a substantial presence.
Most of these members "accepted dictatorial laws that took the lives of the Heaven's Hundred," Poroshenko said, using the common term for those killed during the protests against Yanukovych, many by sniper fire.
He emphasized the need to elect new leaders from the war-torn areas of east Ukraine in order to represent the region in the new government. It wasn't clear how it would be possible to conduct elections at such short notice in Donetsk and Luhansk, where hundreds of thousands have fled their homes and shelling between rebel and government forces continues daily.
Over the past month, Ukrainian forces have made substantial inroads against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, taking control of several sizable towns and cities that had been under rebel control since April, when the clashes began.
But the advances have come at a high cost -- more than 2,000 civilians and at least 726 Ukrainian servicemen reportedly killed. There is no independent figure for the number of rebel dead, although Ukrainian authorities said Monday that 250 rebels were killed in fighting around Olenivka, a town 15 miles south of Donetsk.
Leaders Head for Talks
Many have expressed hopes that a summit today in Minsk, Belarus, which includes both Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, could be aimed at pressuring Ukraine into seeking a negotiated end to the conflict rather than a military victory.
"Russia is looking to go into tomorrow's negotiations with the strongest possible hand," Alexei Makarkin, a deputy director at the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, said Monday by phone. "The Kremlin's moves to boost the rebels' position and Lavrov's hard-line statements, while seeming to contradict Russia's stated desire to reach a deal, are aimed at entering the talks from a position of strength."
Poroshenko and Putin will be joined by representatives of the European Union and the Russia-led Customs Union, including the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met Poroshenko in Kiev last week, said "one big breakthrough" is unlikely at talks between him and Putin. Lavrov said the talks will focus on economic ties, the humanitarian crisis and the prospects for a political resolution in Ukraine.
Ukraine, which agreed to a $17 billion bailout with the International Monetary Fund in May, may need as much as $8 billion in additional external aid during the next two years to finance the mounting costs of war, a military revamp and reconstruction in the east, Chris Weafer, a founder of Macro Advisory in Moscow, said by email.
Putin and Poroshenko have both "tried to strengthen their respective positions in recent weeks, but both are under increasing pressure to bring an end to the conflict," he said. "The problem remains that neither wants, nor can afford, to be seen as a loser in the conflict."
2nd Aid Convoy
Russia announced plans, meanwhile, to send a second aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine, where months of fighting have left many residential buildings in ruins.
Russia's unilateral dispatch of more than 200 trucks into Ukraine on Friday was denounced by the Ukrainian government as an invasion and condemned by the United States, the EU and NATO. Even though the tractor-trailers returned to Russia without incident Saturday, the announcement of another convoy was likely to raise new suspicions.
"The fact that the first convoy eventually delivered aid with no excess or incidents gives us reason to hope that the second one will go much more smoothly," said Lavrov.
He said the food, water and other goods the convoy delivered Friday to the hard-hit rebel city of Luhansk were being distributed Monday and that Red Cross workers were involved in talks on how best to do that. There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross.
In sending in the first convoy, Russia said it had lost patience with what it called Ukraine's stalling tactics. It claimed that soon "there will no longer be anyone left to help" in Luhansk, where weeks of heavy shelling have cut off power, water and phone service and made food scarce.
"We want to coordinate our actions with Ukrainian authorities, which are also planning to send additional humanitarian aid to the southeast," Lavrov said. "We'll work on ensuring security guarantees from the side of the militias."
The Ukrainian government had said the aid convoy was a ploy by Russia to get supplies to the rebels and slow down the government's military advances.
Ukraine has said there's a buildup of Russian military equipment along its border.
Fighting in the region continued as the village of Komuna in the Donetsk region was shelled by rebels using Grad missiles, Ukraine's Lysenko said. Government troops engaged rebels 39 times in the past day as clashes left four soldiers killed and 31 wounded, he said Monday.
The Ukrainian army beat back attempted counterattacks by insurgents in the main population centers of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as in Ilovaysk and Rovenki, Lysenko said. The country's air force also destroyed a column of rebel vehicles in the region, inflicting "severe losses" on the separatists, he said.
Celebrating the 23rd anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union on Monday, soldiers, armored vehicles and missile launchers passed down the main Khreshchatyk thoroughfare in Kiev, with some sent to the front line after the parade.
Insurgents in Donetsk countered by forcing captured Ukrainian soldiers to walk through the city center at gunpoint and displaying incinerated hardware lost by government troops.
Several officials from Human Rights Watch said the parade violated Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" against prisoners of war.
When questioned about the rebel military parade, Lavrov said: "I saw a picture of this parade. I did not see anything close to abuse."
Speaking at the parade in Kiev, Poroshenko announced a military spending increase, pledging to allocate more than $3 billion in 2015-17.
"Unfortunately, there will always be a military threat to Ukraine," Poroshenko said. "War has come from the side nobody expected."
Information for this article was contributed by Jim Heintz and Laura Mills of The Associated Press; by Ilya Arkhipov, Kateryna Choursina, James G. Neuger, Patrick Donahue, Daryna Krasnolutska, Tony Czuczka, Jake Rudnitsky, Ksenia Galouchko and Ott Ummelas of Bloomberg News; and by Andrew Roth of The New York Times.
A Section on 08/26/2014