Ukraine destroys Russian convoy, West warns Moscow

US on Friday urged Russia to stop its ‘provocative’ activities after Ukraine said it had destroyed part of a Russian military convoy that entered its territory. US National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden warned that ‘the escalation in Russian activity designed to destabilise Ukraine in recent weeks is extremely dangerous and provocative’. NATO accused Russia of active involvement in the ‘destabilisation’ of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists have been fighting against Kiev for four months. Ukrain’s President Petro Poroshenko told British Prime Minister David Cameron that government artillery had destroyed a ‘considerable part’ of a small military convoy that entered eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s defence ministry dismissed the alleged military column as a ‘phantom’, its latest denial of Western accusations that it is funnelling weapons to the separatists who launched an insurgency against Kiev in April. Adding to the diplomatic pressure on Moscow, the European Union demanded that Russia ‘put an immediate stop to any form of border hostilities, in particular to the flow of arms, military advisers and armed personnel into the conflict region, and to withdraw its forces from the border’, according to AFP.