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The Ukrainian government sent trucks carrying humanitarian aid to Lugansk on Wednesday, a spokesman for President Petro Poroshenko told The Financial Times.
The announcement comes a day after an estimated 280 Russian trucks left Moscow allegedly on a humanitarian mission to the war torn regions of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk made it clear that Kiev would not allow fleet of white Russian convoys to cross the border, The Guardian reported.
From The New York Times:
On Tuesday, Russia insisted that it had reached an agreement that the aid would go through, while Ukraine, seeming to wake up late to the theatrical gesture of having nearly 300 aid trucks rolling toward its frontier, began scrambling to show that it too planned to organize aid for the beleaguered civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Yatsenyuk's statements are consistent with a mandate that was given to The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to handle all humanitarian shipments to areas where Russian separatists are fighting Ukrainian nationalists. The ICRC said that while the Russian government told them about the possibility of an aid delivery to Ukraine last week, the specifics had not yet been agreed upon.