'Street fighting in Luhansk'

Fighting was taking place between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, situated near the Russian border, a Ukrainian military spokesman said on Tuesday.

"One district of the town has been liberated and there are street battles in the city center," the spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, told journalists.

Pro-Moscow separatists took over the city in April, declaring it an autonomous "people's republic." Ukrainian forces have been besieging Luhansk for weeks, and residents there have been without running water or electricity for more than two weeks, with food also in short supply.

If the report of fighting in Luhansk itself is verified, it would represent a major breakthrough for Ukrainian forces as they seek to quell the insurgency in the east.

As many as 500 people a day have been fleeing the city amid the continued fighting.

Deadly convoy attack?

Lysenko also said that fifteen bodies have been recovered from the site of an alleged rocket strike on Monday on a refugee convoy of buses and cars near Luhansk.

The Kyiv military has blamed the attack on the rebels, but they have denied responsibility or even denied that such an attack had occurred. There has been no independent confirmation of the incident.

The US State Department has condemned the reported attack, but said it could not confirm who was responsible.

"We strongly condemn the shelling and rocketing of a convoy that was bearing internally displaced persons in Luhansk ... Sadly, they were trying to get away from the fighting and instead became victims of it, "State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told a news briefing in Washington.

Germany spearheads diplomacy

As international diplomacy aimed at ending the four-month conflict in Ukraine continues, Germany has said Chancellor Angela Merkel will be traveling to Kyiv on Saturday for crisis talks.

"At the center of the talks will be the current situation in Ukraine and the relationship with Russia," Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said on Tuesday in a statement.

The visit is to include a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who had invited Merkel to Kyiv.

Another round of top-level diplomatic talks on Sunday in Berlin with the Russian, Ukrainian, German and French foreign ministers failed to produce any apparent progress toward a truce in eastern Ukraine. The ministers were said to be consulting with their governments over a possible continuation of talks by telephone.

The conflict has strained ties between Russia and the West, with the European Union and the United States imposing tough sanctions on Moscow because of its actions in Ukraine, including the annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March.

The West and Kyiv also accuse Russia of supplying the rebels in eastern Ukraine with weapons and recruits.

tj/mg (dpa, Reuters, AFP)