An ultimatum issued by Ukraine's acting president for pro-Russian protesters in control of government buildings in the east of the country to lay down their arms or face an "anti-terrorist" operation passed on Monday with no sign of movement on either side.
The deadline – 9am local time (0700 GMT) – passed after the UN security council met in an emergency session in New York, where Russia called Ukraine's threat to mobilise armed forces a "criminal order".
Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said on Monday that the operation would soon begin. In a nationally televised address on Sunday night, he promised amnesty to those who had not fired at security forces if they laid down their arms and vacated seized government buildings.
The statement came after pro-Russian protesters seized more government buildings in several cities in the Donetsk region on Sunday, actions for which locals have claimed credit. Kiev and Washington have blamed Russia for inciting the takeovers.
Protesters have been occupying an administration building in the regional capital, Donetsk, and a security service building in neighbouring Luhansk region for over a week, and this weekend they took over several buildings in Slaviansk and nearby cities.
On Monday morning, Sergei Taruta, the Kiev-appointed governor of Donetsk, said an "anti-terrorist operation" was under way in the region and called on citizens "not to react to provocations", but Slaviansk and the capital appeared to be quiet.
A man who identified himself as Vyacheslav Ponomaryov in a video uploaded from a barricade in Slaviansk on Monday said government forces were moving towards the city from an airfield outside it and said one civilian had been wounded in a clash with them. He said the previous mayor had fled and he had been appointed as his replacement.
Also on Monday, the Ukrainian security and defence council head Andriy Parubiy said intelligence services had detained Russian secret agents in Ukraine, but did not provide further details.
The pro-Kiev analyst Dmitry Tymchuk, a Ukrainian army and defence ministry veteran, wrote on Facebook on Monday that Russian intelligence services had created "agent networks" in Ukraine in 2010-13, laying the groundwork for the "saboteurs and co-ordinators from Russia".
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said on Monday that no Russian agents were in eastern Ukraine. He said any powers that encouraged Kiev to use force against protesters must take full responsibility for their actions.
Sunday saw the first deaths in the burgeoning crisis in eastern Ukraine, where a majority speak Russian as their first language. The Ukrainian interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said one state security officer had been killed and five wounded in an operation in Slaviansk on Sunday, and the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that one pro-Russian activist had been killed.
The Guardian found evidence of shootouts in Slaviansk on Sunday, including a clash between government troops and unknown men on a road outside the city.
A video of the aftermath of the gun battle showed a wounded man in camouflage and a man in a black uniform with a machine gun, apparently dead. A witness said the man in the black uniform was a provocateur who had tried to spur the reluctant troops to attack civilians, but other video from Slaviansk showed Ukrainian forces dressed in similar black uniforms in a standoff with unarmed locals.
Troops ultimately pulled back without moving into the city, where locals continue to occupy a police station and a security service building.
Both the US and Nato have accused Russia of staging another Crimea-style intervention, with Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, saying events were following the same pattern as in the Black Sea peninsula, where unidentified military forces took over government installations before the area was in effect annexed last month.
"[The unrest] is professional, it's co-ordinated, there is nothing grassroots-seeming about it," Power said. "The forces are doing, in each of the six or seven cities they have been active in, exactly the same thing. Certainly it bears the telltale signs of Moscow's involvement," she told ABC's This Week.
The Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, described the protests as "a concerted campaign of violence by pro-Russian separatists, aiming to destabilise Ukraine as a sovereign state".
He said the appearance of men carrying Russian weapons and wearing uniforms without insignia was a "grave development" and called on Russia to pull back its troops from Ukraine's border.
EU foreign ministers are to meet on Monday to discuss the crisis in Ukraine. Lady Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, said she was "gravely concerned".
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