Ukraine claims more territory as fight intensifies with rebels

Military operations

Ukraine crisis

A spokesman for Ukraine's Security Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Kiev was trying to close in on the crash site and force the rebels out of the area but was not conducting military operations in the immediate vicinity.

He said Ukrainian troops were now in the towns of Torez and Shakhtarsk, both formerly held by the rebels, while fighting was in progress for Snezhnoye and Pervomaisk. The towns are all located in rolling countryside near the wheat and sunflower fields filled with debris from the downed airliner.

Government troops were also readying an assault on Gorlovka, a rebel stronghold north of the provincial capital Donetsk.

"The Ukrainian military is conducting an active assault on regions under temporary control of Russian mercenaries," Lysenko told a news conference in Kiev.

In Donetsk, local officials said artillery fire had damaged residential blocks, houses, power lines and a gas pipeline. The city, with a pre-war population of nearly 1 million, has largely become a ghost town since rebels dug in for a stand in the face of advancing Ukrainian troops.

In Luhansk, another rebel stronghold, local officials said 93 civilians had been killed in the last month's fighting.

The site of the crash of the Malaysian airliner has yet to be secured or thoroughly investigated, more than 10 days after the crash. After days in which bodies lay untended in the sun, rebels gathered the human remains and shipped the bodies out, and turned over the flight recorders to a Malaysian delegation.

But the wreckage itself is still largely unguarded, and much of it has been moved or dismantled in what the rebels say was part of the operation to recover the bodies. No full forensic sweep has been conducted to ensure all human remains have been collected. Both side accuse the other of using fighting to prevent the investigation.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said its observers attempting to reach the crash site with investigators from Australia and the Netherlands were forced to return to Donetsk for "security reasons".

A rebel leader, Vladimir Antyufeyev, told reporters in Donetsk that separatist fighters escorting the international experts to the site encountered fighting and turned back.

Antyufeyev, who like most of the senior rebel leadership is an outsider from Russia, also blamed the "senseless" Ukrainian army for trying to destroy evidence at the crash site under cover of fighting.

He said government forces were advancing on Donetsk with the aim of encircling the city.