KIEV: Ukrainian forces ceded a strategic eastern airport to pro-Russian insurgents on Monday as the government in Kiev accused Moscow of launching a “great war” that could claim tens of thousands of lives.

The sense of foreboding in Kiev came as European-mediated talks over the fast-escalating crisis opened in the Belarussian capital Minsk behind closed doors, attended by government, separatist and Russian envoys.

The rebels have launched a major counter-offensive in recent days that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies claim is backed by Russian forces — a charge Moscow denies.

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Valeriy Geletey vowed on Monday to “immediately mount defences against Russia, which is trying not only to secure positions held by terrorists before but to advance on other territories of Ukraine”.

“A great war arrived at our doorstep, the likes of which Europe has not seen since World War II,” he wrote on Facebook, warning of “tens of thousands of deaths”.

Russian agencies quoted rebel representatives demanding at the Belarus meeting that Kiev provides the separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk with a “unique procedure” that would let them integrate closer with Russia.

The developments come a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin evoked for the first time that the issue of “statehood” should be brought up in talks on the crisis in the east, where fighting has killed over 2,600 people since mid-April.

Putin accused Europe of ignoring the Ukrainian military’s “direct targeting” of civilians in the conflict and said the offensive pushed by insurgents there were simply an attempt to expel Kiev’s forces from residential areas.

OVERT AGGRESSION: Kiev said its forces south of the rebel hub of Lugansk were forced to retreat from the local airfield and a nearby village after withstanding artillery fire and battling a Russian tank battalion.

“There is direct, overt aggression against Ukraine from the neighbouring state,” Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said.

The retreat marked the latest setback for Ukrainian troops, which had been closing in on rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk until about a week ago, when the insurgents opened a new front in the south.

Since then, the rebels’ lightning offensive has forced Ukrainian army units to abandon numerous positions gear up for the defence the southeast and of the important southeastern port city of Mariupol, which had been peaceful for months after government troops routed the rebels in May.

The presence of Ukrainian army in the region has visibly decreased in recent days.

“The town is being erased off the face of the earth,” said Yelena Proidak, a resident of Petrovske, a town between Donetsk and Lugansk.

“There is no normal life here.” On the Azov Sea coast, where the Kiev government still controls the 500,000-strong Mariupol, rocket launchers were used to fire on two Ukrainian patrol boats about five kilometres from the shore. Two border guards from one of the crews went missing, Kiev said.

Published in Dawn, September 2nd , 2014