Ukraine cease-fire pressured by pro-Russia attacks, weapons buildup

Pro-Russia separatists attacked Ukrainian government forces with Grad rockets and artillery in two unsuccessful attempts to seize the idled Donetsk international airport, Ukrainian security officials said Tuesday.

The concerted campaign to wrest Ukraine’s second-largest airport from government control coincided with stepped-up assaults on Ukrainian troops in other areas of eastern Ukraine in spite of a Sept. 5 cease-fire agreement, Col. Andriy Lysenko of the National Security and Defense Council told reporters in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

Renewed fighting in the last three days has threatened to undermine the cease-fire agreed to in the Belarus capital of Minsk nearly four weeks ago, and a decision by the European Union on Tuesday to keep sanctions in place on Russia could erode any incentive Moscow has to abide by the truce.

As cease-fire violations mounted, Russia announced that it was deploying a sophisticated anti-aircraft defense system to the Krasnodar area of southern Russia for “combat duty.� The Black Sea coastal area is just east of the Crimean peninsula annexed by the Kremlin in March and southeast of the Ukrainian territory where Russia-backed separatists have seized dozens of towns and cities and proclaimed them part of independent republics.

“An air defense missile system regiment of the 4th Air and Air Defense Forces Command of the Southern Military District has taken up combat duty in the Krasnodar region,� the military district news service announced in a statement carried by the RIA Novosti news agency. “It is equipped with the advanced S-400 Triumf and Pantsir-S missile systems.�

The S-400 missiles are capable of destroying airborne targets as far away as 250 miles, according to the topwar.ru Military Review website.

The European Union and the United States this month ratcheted up sanctions on Russia for its alleged role in fomenting the violence in Ukraine, which the United Nations human rights office says has claimed at least 3,500 lives since April. EU leaders agreed Tuesday to keep the visa bans and financial restrictions on Russian officials and companies for the time being in spite of what they saw as “encouraging progress� toward ending the conflict in Ukraine, said Maja Kocijancic, foreign affairs spokeswoman for the 28-nation alliance.

“I don’t see any change at the moment regarding Russia’s position,� German Chancellor Angela Merkel observed during a Berlin news conference with visiting Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.

Merkel, who grew up in Soviet-dominated East Germany, noted that it took 40 years for Germans to throw off communist rule and that the battle to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and other former Soviet republics may also be a long-term undertaking.

Putin, meanwhile, was visiting Kazakhstan on Tuesday in a show of fraternity with the former Soviet republic whose independence he questioned last month, suggesting its post-Soviet sovereignty might not last beyond the life its 74-year-old president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

“The Kazakhs had never had statehood� before Nazarbayev created it, Putin said, stirring fears that the Kremlin may be eyeing a more dominant role in the country where 24% of the population is ethnic Russian and widely scattered across the vast territory. He also observed during remarks to young Russians at a Kremlin-sponsored youth camp in late August that most Kazakhstan residents wanted to remain part of the “big Russian world.�

Putin has justified his seizure of Crimea and the proxy rebels’ occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as necessary to protect the security and interests of Ukraine’s 7.8 million Russians, who comprise 17% of the country but are highly concentrated in the east and south.

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