Life returns somewhat to normal as truce takes hold in Ukrainian city

Children and parents rode ponies and fed pigeons in the park. A newlywed couple was showered with flower petals -- the sixth wedding held Saturday, a registration official said. Life, it seemed, had returned to something like normal in this Ukrainian city on the second day of a cease-fire between separatists and government troops.

The truce called the day before to end five months of conflict in eastern Ukraine that cost nearly 3,000 lives appeared to be holding, though both sides accused the other of violations.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, spoke by telephone Saturday and Poroshenko’s office later released a statement saying that “the heads of both countries stated that the cease-fire regime was observed on the whole.”

Pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, however, issued a statement on their website accusing government forces of violating the truce. “The [separatists-held] village of Amvrosiyevka was shot at twice on Saturday,” Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said in the statement. “It is early yet to speak about a complete cease-fire.”

Mariupol, the second-largest city in the Donetsk region with a population of 500,000, was still recovering from a week of being threatened by separatists backed by regular Russian troops who had crossed the border late last month. Thousands of residents had fled the city in recent days, fearing an imminent assault.

“Classes in school are half-empty as people took their kids and left, and the city looked like a ghost town yesterday,” Dmitry Konkov, a 43-year-old businessman, said in an interview Saturday as he walked in the park with his 5-year-old daughter. “I decided to stay just another day and I was right – reason prevailed. Any truce, even a bad one, is better than a good fight.”

A few miles away on the front line that had been the scene of fierce fighting during the week, Ukrainian soldiers were happy to take off their flak jackets, helmets and sweat-stained tunics. They were basking shirtless in the sun, enjoying a lull in the fighting that few of them expected to last.

“I know it is not for long and that we will go back into the battle, maybe as early as the next day,” said a private who, like many of the soldiers, asked to be identified by his code-named: Violent.

“You can’t trust Putin, who lied his head off so many times before about this war in which his troops, as he says, are taking no part,” Violent said with sarcasm as he sipped tea while sitting on a wooden ammo crate. “Are we fighting ghosts then, or zombies?”

Sudden gunfire sent the resting soldiers reaching for their weapons until a comrade came out of the woods with a Kalashnikov in his hands and said that he was shooting at a rabbit.

“Damn it, I missed, and it must have been a Russian rabbit,” the soldier said as his companions laughed. “I am sick and tired of eating this … canned food, wanted to treat ourselves to a feast.”

Not far from the group another group of soldiers were loading a damaged artillery piece onto a truck, while other vehicles carrying soldiers and ammo passed by. The road had been largely deserted Friday when the troops were under fire, but now it was busy as Ukrainian forces took advantage of the calm to regroup.

Later in the day, the opposition forces fired a few mortar rounds at Ukrainian positions but no one was hurt, said a spokesman with the Azov Battalion, a volunteer Ukrainian militia.

“Our friends from the Aydar Battalion were not so lucky today,” said the spokesman, code-named Baida, referring to another militia unit. “They ran into an ambush in the [neighboring] Luhansk region and lost as many as 10 men dead. How can you call that a truce now?”