The Guardian -by Shaun WalkerAn explosion on a gas pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe throughUkraine was described as a possible terrorist attack on Tuesday, as fighting in the east of Ukraine continued.
The explosion on a section of the pipeline in the Poltava region came a day after Russia‘s Gazprom monopoly said it would stop supplying Ukraine with gas for its own needs until the country paid a huge accumulated debt.
Witnesses reported a huge blaze in the area of the explosion, but Ukrainian authorities said there was no disruption to gas flow to Europe as an alternative pipeline was used. The interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said several possible causes were being investigated, including terrorism.
Separately, at least one Russian journalist died when his crew got caught in shelling on Tuesday, as a Ukrainian army operation against armed separatists in the east continued.
Igor Kornelyuk, 37, died in hospital, and his sound engineer is missing. Russia’s foreign ministry said the incident highlighted the “criminal nature” of the Ukrainian operation against the separatists, and called for an investigation.
Last month, an Italian photographer and his Russian translator were killed during shelling in the town of Slavyansk, one of the hotbeds of the insurgency.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the Ukrainians of policies of “ethnic cleansing” in the east. “Instead of the ceasefire promised by President [Petro] Poroshenko, we have heard people in Kiev calling for only a temporary ceasefire so that so-called separatists can leave the territory of Ukraine. This is not a national dialogue, or negotiations with the regions, this is ethnic cleansing,” he said.
Poroshenko, who was inaugurated as president last week, said a ceasefire could be implemented when Ukrainian forces had regained control of the border with Russia, and there could be an amnesty for those who did not have “blood on their hands”. Few details of how this might work in practice have been released.
The conflict has so far left around 300 people dead and forced thousands to flee their homes. Kiev accuses Russia of backing the rebels with financial and logistical support.
There was further diplomatic fallout on Tuesday over comments by Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Deshchytsia, at the weekend referring to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, as a “dickhead”.
On Monday, Lavrov said he had nothing more to say to his Ukrainian counterpart and did not plan to speak to him ever again. This prompted Ukraine’s interior minister Avakov to write on Facebook that for Lavrov, “lying comes as easily as drinking vodka does for an alcoholic”.
Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament’s international affairs committee, suggested on Tuesday that Russia should impose sanctions on members of the Ukrainian government for their insulting comments. Pushkov said Russia should abandon its long-held stance that sanctions are an inadmissible diplomacy tool.
“At a time when a large number of global actors from the leading countries of the contemporary world apply sanctions, I think Russia is narrowing its foreign political potential by rejecting this instrument,” he said.
The EU wired Kiev a €500m (£400m) loan on Tuesday, which the European economics commissioner Olli Rehn said was “a further concrete sign of European solidarity”. Brussels has pledged £8.8bn to Ukraine in coming years, and will sign a free-trade agreement with Kiev next week. The former president Viktor Yanukovych’s U-turn over signing the treaty sparked protests that eventually forced him from office in February.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/17/ukraine-gas-pipeline-explosion