After more than four months of bloodshed, a cease-fire in Ukraine's rebellious east largely held back fighting today, but appeared fragile as both sides of the conflict claimed the others had violated the agreement.
A statement from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's appeared to make glancing reference to the cease-fire's tentativeness, saying said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed steps "for giving the cease-fire a stable character" in a telephone conversation Saturday.
But, it said, both leaders assessed the cease-fire as having been "fulfilled as a whole."
Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's national security council, told reporters that rebels had fired at Ukrainian forces on 10 occasions after the cease-fire was to take effect, but all the incidents he detailed took place yesterday night.
In Donetsk, the largest city controlled by the Russian-backed separatists, the night passed quietly a rarity after several months of daily shelling in residential areas.
But Alexander Zakharchenko, the top separatist leader from Donetsk, told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that the cease-fire had been violated with two rounds of shelling in the town of Amvrosiivka, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of Donetsk.
"At this time the cease-fire agreement is not being fully observed," he said. He didn't say when the supposed breach was to have occurred.
Lysenko said Ukrainian forces were strictly observing the cease-fire and suggested that Zakharchenko's claim was a provocation.
Ukraine had received information that the rebels on Friday "were preparing a press conference for today (in which) one of the points was the condemnation of the Ukrainian military for violation of the cease-fire," Lysenko said through a translator. "So we do not exclude that they tried to provoke the Ukrainian military to fire."
Earlier today, the mayor's office in Donetsk said there had been no reports of shooting or shelling there although some shelling had been heard late yesterday afternoon. The city council of the second-largest rebel-held city of Luhansk, which had endured intense fighting for weeks, also reported the night was quiet.
Ukraine, Russia and the Kremlin-backed separatists signed the cease-fire deal yesterday in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, in an effort to end more than four months of fighting in the region. The negotiators also agreed on the withdrawal of all heavy weaponry, the release of all prisoners and the delivery of humanitarian aid to devastated cities in eastern Ukraine.
