Ukraine’s military have said more than 20 Russian tanks, 10 missile systems and bus-loads of fighters crossed Ukraine’s border and headed towards Novoazovsk, a rebel-held town east of the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol.
"In recent days, despite the Minsk (ceasefire) agreement, military equipment and ammunition has been tracked crossing from Russia into Ukraine, " military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said in a televised briefing.
“More than 20 (tanks, 10 self-propelled artillery systems and 15 trucks have entered in the direction of Novoazovsk,” he said, adding that buses filled with fighters from Russia had also been spotted crossing the border in the area.
Fighting has persisted in east Ukraine, despite new European efforts to ensure a ceasefire takes hold.
The Ukrainian military said pro-Russian separatists had attacked positions held by government troops 49 times in the past 24 hours, using rockets, artillery and armoured vehicles,
"The number of attacks show the terrorists do not want to completely silence their guns," Ukrainian military spokesman Anatoly Stelmach said.
He said there had been some shelling in the district of Mariupol – mostly government-held territory on the Sea of Azov that Kiev fears may become the focus of the separatists’ next offensive.
The rebels accused the government forces of also staging attacks, including on what they said were residential areas of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
Meanwhile, a House of Lords report has accused the EU and Britain of “sleepwalked” into the Ukraine crisis, failing to grasp its exceptional nature and lacking the ability to read political shifts in Russia.
In their report, lawmakers from the upper house of Britain's parliament heaped criticism on Moscow, which they said had been gradually turning away from Europe and had misread Ukraine's appetite for a trade deal with the EU.
But the House of Lords’ EU Sub-Committee on External Affairs reserved some of its harshest criticism for the EU and Britain, saying they had made a series of errors in the run-up to the crisis and were partly to blame for the situation unravelling.
“There has been a strong element of ‘sleepwalking’ into the current crisis, with Member States being taken by surprise by events in Ukraine,” the report said, saying the EU’s absence of political oversight over trade talks with Kiev had been glaring.
“A loss of collective analytical capacity has weakened Member States’ ability to read the political shifts in Russia and to offer an authoritative response,” it added, saying the EU had failed to appreciate “the exceptional nature” of Ukraine.
Lawmakers also said that Britain, as a signatory to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, had a particular responsibility to Ukraine but had not been as active or as visible as it could have been.
The memorandum guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its renouncing of its nuclear arsenal.