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Ukraine's president-elect, Petro Poroshenko, promised late Thursday to punish pro-Russian rebels who hours earlier shot down an army helicopter in eastern Ukraine, killing 14 soldiers.
"These criminal acts perpetrated by the Ukrainian people's enemies will not go unpunished," he told UNIAN, a Ukrainian news agency.
Poroshenko, who will be inaugurated on June 7, called the pro-Russian rebels "terrorists" and "bandits," supported by "outside" forces.
The White House has expressed concern over Russia's alleged role in supporting rebels in Ukraine's eastern regions and has asked Moscow to use its influence to end the conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied the allegations, although a rebel leader on Thursday admitted that 33 out of the 40 rebels killed in a battle for the Donetsk airport were Russian nationals from Muslim regions, including Chechnya.
Pro-Russian rebels targeted the Ukrainian helicopter on Thursday amid heavy fighting around the eastern city of Slovyansk.
Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, told the parliament in Kiev that rebels used a portable air-defense missile to down the helicopter and said Gen. Volodymyr Kulchitsky was among the dead.
"I have just received information that terrorists using Russian anti-aircraft missiles shot down our helicopter near Slovyansk. It had been ferrying servicemen for a change of duty," Turchynov said.
Slovyansk has become the epicenter of fighting between pro-Russian rebels and government forces in recent weeks. Located 100 miles from the Russian border, it has seen constant clashes and its residential areas have regularly come under mortar shelling from government forces, causing civilian casualties and prompting some residents to flee.
The city of 120,000 is in the Donetsk region of the country, one of the two provinces in eastern Ukraine, along with Luhansk, that have declared independence from the government in Kiev, though Ukrainian authorities reject the legitimacy of these moves.
Separately on Thursday, a pro-Russian leader confirmed that his fighters were holding four missing observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and promised they would be released shortly. Vyacheslav Ponomarev, the self-proclaimed "people's mayor" of Slovyansk, told the Associated Press that the monitors — from Turkey, Switzerland, Estonia and Denmark — were safe.
"I addressed the OSCE mission to warn them that their people should not over the coming week travel in areas under our control. And they decided to show up anyway," Ponomarev said.
"We will deal with this and then release them," he said, without setting a specific time frame.
Putin has supported an OSCE peace plan that calls for ending hostilities and launching a political dialogue and has said Russia would work with Poroshenko. But Russia has repeatedly urged the Ukrainian government to end its military operation against the rebels.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday called for quick international mediation to persuade Kiev to halt what he described as a "punitive operation" in the east.
The Foreign Ministry's statement on Thursday was more blunt
"We once again demand that the Kiev authorities stop the fratricidal war and start a real national dialogue," it read. "We again call on our Western partners to use all their influence on Kiev to stop Ukraine's slide into national catastrophe."
Al Jazeera and wire services
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