Ukrainian army tanks move past a checkpoint as they patrol the area near eastern Ukrainian town of Debaltseve, yesterday. Photos: Reuters

Pro-Russian separatists battled yesterday to keep advancing Ukrainian government forces at bay in heavy fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, the rebels’ main stronghold in eastern Ukraine.

Shelling by Ukrainian troops, some of them in sunflower fields outside the large industrial city, killed six people over the weekend, city officials said, as well as setting buildings ablaze and leaving shell craters in roads.

The army has all but encircled the other main rebel redoubt of Luhansk, where three civilians were killed in the latest fighting, and is trying to tighten the noose around Donetsk.

Fighting has intensified since the downing of a Malaysian airliner in rebel-held territory on July 17 and, with each side blaming the other for the deaths of the 298 crew and passengers, relations between Russia and the West are deteriorating rapidly.

It is an unspeakable abomination that two weeks after this crash there are still bodies on the crash site unrecovered and the Russians have not used their influence with the separatists

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to persuade the rebels to end the conflict and to ensure they do not hinder international experts trying to recover human remains from the plane’s wreckage.

“It is an unspeakable abomination that two weeks after this crash there are still bodies on the crash site unrecovered and the Russians have not used their influence with the separatists,” Hammond told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

“I said last week that there is one man who can snap his fingers and make this happen and he hasn’t done so. He must now do so,” Hammond said, urging Putin to cut off arms to the rebels and “stop destabilising and interfering” in Ukraine.

Putin denies arming the rebels or trying to orchestrate events in Ukraine since the ousting of a president sympathetic to Moscow in February. He accuses the West of attempting to ‘contain’ Russia, using a Cold War-era phrase to suggest the United States wants to reduce Moscow’s global influence.

A military spokesman in the Ukrainian capital Kiev told a briefing the army had now recaptured three-quarters of the territory the rebels once controlled in their self-proclaimed ‘people’s republics’ of Luhansk and Donetsk.

But Russia has firm control of the Crimea peninsula it annexed in March and the separatists are putting up fierce resistance in the last two big cities they hold in the east. A Reuters reporter in central Donetsk said shelling echoed through the night and the smoke from burning buildings in the outlying Petrovsky district stretched as far as the city centre.

“I work in the city centre. It’s easier for me to be at work than to come home. You never know if your house will still be standing when you get back,” the financial director of a small company said in Petrovsky.

“I know people who have come back from work and found they have nowhere to live”.

In another outlying district, Maryinka, roads and houses were pock-marked by shells and some buildings were burnt-out carcasses.

The rebels control a checkpoint there, but an abandoned military truck with the Ukrainian flag by the side of the road bore witness to the fighting there.