Separatists kill 10 troops in attack in eastern Ukraine

Pro-Russian separatists killed at least 10 Ukrainian paratroopers in an overnight ambush in the region of eastern Ukraine where a Malaysian airliner was brought down, government forces said Friday.

The rebels said they had “captured good trophies” and pushed back government forces around the town of Shakhtarsk, where Kiev said a paratrooper unit moving from one base to another came under mortar and tank fire.

Shakhtarsk is close to the rolling fields where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 came down on July 17, killing 298 people, and fighting has raged around the area for several days as the Ukrainian army tries to quell the separatist rebellion in the country’s east.

“Our troops were ambushed,” Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” operation said on Facebook.

In other violence, city authorities said five civilians has been killed and nine injured in the past 24 hours in Luhansk, one of the two last big rebel strongholds.

Since the airliner came down, government forces have intensified their military offensive in mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, forcing the rebels out of several other towns and holding them in check in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Luhansk, the smaller of the two cities, is now almost completely surrounded by government troops. It has been cut off from food supplies and left with no electricity or running water, residents say.

Rebel commander Igor Girkin declared a state of siege in the rebel-held territory in and around Donetsk, saying this allowed his fighters to confiscate cars, construction materials, food, medical equipment and phones.

Meanwhile, international experts started recovery work at the wreckage sites of the downed airliner on Friday despite the nearby clashes between government forces and pro-Russian rebels.

The recovery mission included 70 experts from Australia and the Netherlands, whose countries suffered big losses of life in the crash, as well as representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

“Recovery work starts immediately,” the OSCE said on Twitter.

The United Nations said in a report this week that more than 1,100 people have been killed in Ukraine and nearly 3,500 wounded from mid-April through July 26.

The United States said the separatists probably shot down the Malaysian plane by mistake with a Russian-made missile, but the rebels and Moscow deny the accusation and blame the crash on Kiev’s military campaign to quell the uprising.

Al Jazeera and Reuters