MARIUPOL: Mortar bombardments have killed 11 civilians and wounded 22 more in east Ukraine's main rebel bastion of Donetsk over the past 24 hours, local authorities said Thursday.

“As a result of artillery fire on districts of Donetsk 11 civilians died and 22 were injuries,” the city council said in a statement.

The battle for Ukraine’s strategic coastline heated up as a local mayor reported that pro-Russian rebel forces entered a key town in southeast Ukraine after three days of heavy shelling.

Novoazovsk, a resort town of 40,000 on the Sea of Azov, lies in a strategically significant location — on the road linking Russia to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol and onto Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed. Wednesday’s incursion, reported by the town’s mayor, was the first time in the four-month-long conflict between the government in Kiev and separatists in the east that fighting has reached as far south as the seacoast.

It suggests that the rebels — who Ukraine, Nato and Western nations all say are being supported by Russia — have been both emboldened and reinforced.

The new southeastern front also raised fears the separatists are seeking to create a land link between Russia and Crimea. If successful, it could give them or Russia control over the entire Sea of Azov and the gas and mineral riches that energy experts believe it contains. Ukraine already lost roughly half its coastline, several major ports and significant Black Sea mineral rights in March when Russia annexed Crimea.

Oleg Sidorkin, the mayor of Novoazovsk, said that the rebels had entered the town and he had seen dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles roll in. Reporters earlier in the day saw more than 20 shells fall around the town in a one-hour span.

But access from the west was blocked by Ukrainian soldiers later and the presence of rebels in Novoazovsk could not be independently confirmed.

Sidorkin said the rebels had been positioned near Ukraine’s southernmost border with Russia. It was not immediately clear how the rebels could have traveled to the southeast area, which is far from the main front line further north and in an area controlled by the government. Fighters could have easily come over the Russian border, however.

The assault on the town has forced government troops to spread their ranks thinner along the Russian border. A spokesman for Ukraine’s security council, Col. Andriy Lysenko, said “we do not have information that it (Nozoazovsk) is occupied.

“Earlier, he said the shelling around the town was coming from both Ukrainian and Russian territory.

Ukrainian security officials said nearby villages had also come under shelling. In Mariupol, a city of 450,000 about 30 kilometers to the west, the defences built up.

A brigade of Ukrainian forces arrived at the airport on Wednesday afternoon, while deep trenches were dug a day earlier on the city’s edge.

Other troops were blocking traffic from entering or leaving the port’s eastern edge.Artillery shells in Novoazovsk appeared to be flying between rebel and government positions. “It hit a tree, there was a blast and the shrapnel came down here,” said Alexei Podlepentsov, an electrician at the Novoazovsk hospital, which was struck by shelling on Tuesday.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2014