DHAKA: US president Barack Obama launched a European tour on Tuesday shaped by the escalating separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine and worries among former Soviet satellites about Russia’s new expansionist threat.

Obama landed in Warsaw for celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Poland’s first free elections that put both the country and the rest of eastern Europe on a path out of Moscow’s orbit and toward democracy and growing economic prosperity.

But his first big meeting will come on Wednesday when he meets Ukraine’s embattled president-elect Petro Poroshenko with the ex-Soviet state threatened by civil war and its new pro-Western leadership grasping for protection from Washington.

The seven-week pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern rust belt grew only more violent after Poroshenko swept to power in a May 25 presidential ballot on a promise to quickly end fighting and save the nation of 46 million from economic collapse.

Hundreds of separatist gunmen staged one of their biggest offensives to date on Monday by attacking a Ukrainian border guard service camp in the Russian border region of Lugansk.

Ukraine’s military reported suffering no fatalities and killing five rebels in a day-long battle that saw insurgents pelt the camp with mortar fire and deploy snipers on rooftops surrounding the base.

But Lugansk’s self-declared ‘prime minister’ Vasyl Nikitin said that at least three civilians and the separatist administration’s top health official had died in the violence, reports The Straits Times.

BDST: 1510 HRS, JUNE 03, 2014