US President Barack Obama launched a European tour today shaped by the escalating separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine and worries among former Soviet satellites about Russia's new expansionist threat.
Obama landed in Warsaw for celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Poland's first free elections that put both the country and the rest of eastern Europe on a path out of Moscow's orbit and toward democracy and growing economic prosperity.
But his first big meeting will come tomorrow when he meets Ukraine's embattled president-elect Petro Poroshenko with the ex-Soviet state threatened by civil war and its new pro-Western leadership grasping for protection from Washington.
The seven-week pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine's eastern rust belt grew only more violent after Poroshenko swept to power in a May 25 presidential ballot on a promise to quickly end fighting and save the nation of 46 million from economic collapse.
Hundreds of separatist gunmen staged one of their biggest offensives to date yesterday by attacking a Ukrainian border guard service camp in the Russian border region of Lugansk.
Ukraine's military reported suffering no fatalities and killing five rebels in a day-long battle that saw insurgents pelt the camp with mortar fire and deploy snipers on rooftops surrounding the base.
But Lugansk's self-declared "prime minister" Vasyl Nikitin told AFP that at least three civilians and the separatist administration's top health official had died in the violence.
Ukraine's interior minister today urged civilians across parts of the neighbouring coal mining region of Donetsk to stay indoors "in order to avoid risking their lives".
Arsen Avakov wrote on Facebook that a "very intense gunfight" was raging this morning in the small Donetsk region town of Semenivka.
Washington's commitment to Ukraine will be reinforced when US Vice President Joe Biden travels to Kiev on Saturday to attend Poroshenko's swearing in as the fifth post-Soviet president of Ukraine.
The visit is meant to underscore the US position that the people of Ukraine - and not Moscow - should decide their destiny and overcome the cultural differences now tearing apart the vast country's Russified east and more nationalist west.
Kiev has not yet invited any Moscow official to the inauguration and Russian President Vladimir Putin is yet to formally recognise the result of an election that saw rebels disrupt voting across swathes of the east.
