Thursday, April 24, 2014
Ukrainian forces killed up to five pro-Moscow rebels on Thursday as they closed in on the separatists’ military stronghold in the east and Russia launched army drills near the border in response, raising fears its troops would go in.
Under an international accord signed in Geneva last week, illegal armed groups in Ukraine, including the rebels occupying about a dozen public buildings in the largely Russian-speaking east, are supposed to disarm and go home.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2014
In what appears to be its first act after the restart of an anti-terror operation to purge Kremlin-backed separatists from eastern Ukraine, the country’s elite Interior Ministry forces “liberated” the resort town of Svyatohirsk in northern Donetsk Oblast “from unlawful armed groups,” the ministry reported on its website.
Prior to the operation, Ukrainian security officials had discovered the city’s monastery, the Svyatohirsk Assumption Lavra of the Moscow Patriarchate, served as a military base for the insurgents who have besieged the region.
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Kachin refugees are seen in a tent at a rescue camp in the Chinese southwestern border city of Ruili, Yunnan province early this year. (Photo: Reuters)
The Burmese government has blamed troops from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) for an escalation of hostilities that has displaced thousands of civilians this month in Kachin State, amid claims by rebel leaders that government forces have repeatedly been the first to attack.
Ye Htut, the presidential spokesman in Naypyidaw, accused the KIA of violating a ceasefire agreement during the recent surge in fighting, which has left 22 soldiers dead and 5,000 people displaced.
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Tuesday, April 22, 2014
African troops captured a junior commander with the Lord’s Resistance Army and rescued 10 people, mostly children, abducted by the rebels, Uganda’s military said Tuesday, the latest blow against the rebel group in an international hunt for its fugitive leaders.
The commander — a rebel lieutenant known as Charles Okello — was seized after a firefight in Central African Republic, where Uganda-led African Union troops are hunting down the rebels in vast jungle, said Ugandan military spokesman Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda. Up to 10 civilians, seven of them children, were rescued from the rebels, he said.
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At least three jets of the Ugandan air force bombed the positions of the General Peter Gatdet Yak in Bor, the capital of Jonglei State.
One of the jets is reported to have been shut down by Gatdet’s forces, Eyewitnesses in the area told the South Sudan News Agency.
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