Intense fighting has erupted around east Ukraine's main rebel-held
city, wrecking a power station and briefly trapping more than 300 coal
miners in one of Europe's largest pits.
Repeated rounds of rocket and mortar fire echoed across snow-covered Donetsk on Sunday evening despite a formal truce in the nine-month war.
Witnesses said the shelling - particularly heavy on the northern outskirts city where a disputed airport has been under attack for months - had reached levels last seen at the height of the conflict last summer.
A Ukrainian soldier looks down from a military truck at pro-Russian rebels at Donetsk. Photo / AP
It was not immediately clear what provoked the latest escalation of violence or who had launched the first attack.
But it threatens to derail Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko's efforts to arrange direct peace talks with Russia's
Vladimir Putin at a Thursday meeting in Kazakhstan that would also be
attended by the leaders of Germany and France.
A Ukrainian military spokesman in Kiev said the insurgents had targeted federal positions 41 times by Sunday evening.
The spokesman stressed that most of the rebel rocket and artillery strikes occurred around the disputed Donetsk airport that a skeleton crew of government forces has been holding on to since the end of May.
One was reported killed in overnight violence but there was no immediate information about other casualties later in the day.
Local officials said the civilians had also been killed in various incidents across the mostly Russian-speaking east of the separatist region overnight.
Rebels officials said one of the shells fired by Kiev's forces on Sunday afternoon hit a district electricity substation that feeds the city's vast Zasyadko coal mine.
Some 331 miners had been working in the shaft when it went dark, a spokesman for the local coal miners' union said.
The incident affected the pit's ventilation system and halted lifts and elevators that miners use to return to the ground.
"The power went back up at 3.31pm and they started pulling up the miners in groups," Independent Ukrainian Miners Union chairman Mykhailo Volynets told AFP.
Volynets said everyone had been safely evacuated within five hours of the power cut.
Repeated rounds of rocket and mortar fire echoed across snow-covered Donetsk on Sunday evening despite a formal truce in the nine-month war.
Witnesses said the shelling - particularly heavy on the northern outskirts city where a disputed airport has been under attack for months - had reached levels last seen at the height of the conflict last summer.
It was not immediately clear what provoked the latest escalation of violence or who had launched the first attack.
A Ukrainian military spokesman in Kiev said the insurgents had targeted federal positions 41 times by Sunday evening.
The spokesman stressed that most of the rebel rocket and artillery strikes occurred around the disputed Donetsk airport that a skeleton crew of government forces has been holding on to since the end of May.
One was reported killed in overnight violence but there was no immediate information about other casualties later in the day.
Local officials said the civilians had also been killed in various incidents across the mostly Russian-speaking east of the separatist region overnight.
Rebels officials said one of the shells fired by Kiev's forces on Sunday afternoon hit a district electricity substation that feeds the city's vast Zasyadko coal mine.
Some 331 miners had been working in the shaft when it went dark, a spokesman for the local coal miners' union said.
The incident affected the pit's ventilation system and halted lifts and elevators that miners use to return to the ground.
"The power went back up at 3.31pm and they started pulling up the miners in groups," Independent Ukrainian Miners Union chairman Mykhailo Volynets told AFP.
Volynets said everyone had been safely evacuated within five hours of the power cut.
