Daily Ukraine Crisis Updates – August 19, 2014

(Interfax Ukraine) Ukrainian forces were continuing to conduct heavy street fighting against militants in the city of Luhansk.
(Interfax Ukraine) Fifteen bodies were found where a convoy of civilian refugees was shelled in Luhansk region on August 18.
A rebel source told the BBC that no one had survived the attack. Ukraine accused pro-Russian rebels of attacking the convoy but they had denied involvement. A rebel source claimed that everyone in the convoy was killed when two buses carrying wounded civilians came under fire from foreign mercenaries fighting for the government.
(ITAR-TASS) Three people were killed and dozens injured as the town of Makeyevka near Donetsk came under the Ukrainian military's artillery fire.
(RIA Novosti) The government of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic guaranteed safe passage for Russia’s humanitarian convoy and the Red Cross employees accompanying it.

(ITAR-TASS) Deliveries from Russia's humanitarian aid convoy for embattled east Ukraine were suspended again, Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said.
(RIA Novosti) The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Russia and southeastern Ukraine independence supporters have fulfilled their objectives concerning the safety of the humanitarian convoy and Moscow hopes that Kyiv is not trying to deliberately disrupt the aid mission.
(RIA Novosti) The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission working on the Russian-Ukrainian border has not seen any weapons crossing between the countries, an OSCE spokesman working on the Russian side of the border said.
(ITAR-TASS) The Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) will visit a session in January but will refuse to continue working there in 2015 if sanctions are prolonged, head of the delegation Alexei Pushkov said.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and Russian president Vladimir Putin were set to meet the week of August 25th as part of a summit in Minsk between the Eurasian Customs Union, the EU, and Ukraine.
(RIA Novosti) A Kremlin spokesman said that Moscow will consider additional protective measures if the West continues its “destructive” sanction policy.

Annie Cowan