Ukraine clashes kill 12 civilians

KIEV, July 13 (AFP): Escalating clashes between pro-Kremlin separatists and Ukrainian forces on Sunday killed 12 civilians and forced the new Western-backed leader to cancel a pivotal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the World Cup in Brazil.

An explosive security crisis just outside the eastern border of the European Union that has claimed more than 550 lives and enflamed East-West ties threatened to spiral into an all-out civil war over the weekend.

Militias that the West and Kiev allege are being armed by the Kremlin used a Grad multiple-rocket system late Friday to mow down 19 Ukrainian soldiers and wound nearly 100 near the Russian border.

Further attacks killed 18 more troops and 20 civilians -- 12 of them in what Kiev said were missile and other overnight rebel strikes staged across the eastern rustbelt-in violence that appeared to shatter any hope of a truce.

Kiev-backed authorities said six people were killed and eight wounded in a suburb of the almost million-strong rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

Municipal workers in neighbouring Lugansk said six people had also died and seven were injured in various overnight incidents in the other separatist bastion of 425,000.

And an AFP correspondent at the morgue in Maryinka saw the corpses of eight people killed in clashes waged outside that village just west of Donetsk on Saturday afternoon.