Separatists in east Ukraine counted dozens of losses on Tuesday as the deadly toll of fierce clashes with Ukrainian government forces became clear.

Representatives of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic said that they had lost around 50 fighters in Monday's fight for control of Donetsk airport, while the Kiev-appointed mayor of Donetsk, Oleksandr Lukyanchenko, said that there were around 40 dead, including two civilians. He claimed that many of the dead were Russian citizens.

At one central morgue a police investigator said he had seen a list of 33 dead, while doctors claimed there were 43 fighters from the Donetsk People's Republic and one civilian. During the day new bodies arrived, many of them in a disfigured state or missing limbs, evidence of the heavy weaponry that the Ukrainian army had used on the rebels. One body was without a head.

Most of the casualties were from Monday's fighting around Donetsk airport, though some may also have died when trucks carrying injured fighters were hit as they drove back to Donetsk.

A Ukrainian official said that Kiev was now appraised of all separatist positions in the city, and would attack them using "special high-precision weapons" if the separatists did not surrender. The government has intensified the "anti-terrorism operation" in the east since the victory of businessman Petro Poroshenko in presidential elections on Sunday.

Poroshenko, who in early June will formally take over from the interim government which has been in place since former president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Ukraine three months ago, has already said the operation should last not weeks or months, but be over "in a matter of hours". Russia has said it is open for dialogue with Poroshenko but has repeatedly called for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the east.

The rebels are still in control of a number of government buildings in Donetsk and other cities in the region, which have been occupied for more than a month, and in much of the region the police have either remained neutral or gone over to the separatists. However, the airport appeared to be a red line for the Ukrainian authorities, and when a group of around 200 fighters attempted to seize it in the early hours of Monday morning they met with serious resistance, including air strikes.

"The airport is completely under control," Arsen Avakov, the interior minister, told journalists in Kiev on Tuesday. "The adversary suffered heavy losses. We have no losses."

There was sporadic gunfire in the deserted streets around the airport, and the occasional rumble of fighter jets patrolling the skies.

Outside one Donetsk hospital on Tuesday morning, a group of men were patrolling who appeared to be from Russia's North Caucasus, possibly Chechens. They refused to talk and demanded that journalists leave. Ukrainian media have widely reporting that "Kadyrovtsy" – the feared forces loyal to Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov – are involved in the fighting. There have indeed been many sightings of fighters from the North Caucasus present in the region, but it is unclear whether they are volunteers or semi-official battalions sent by the Kremlin or its proxies in the region.

Separately, the Ukrainian border service said it had engaged in a fire-fight with a minibus carrying weapons that had tried to cross from Russia in the early hours of Tuesday morning, seizing a consignment of weapons and injuring one man. It also said there was a column of 40 trucks accompanied by armed men that was waiting on the other side of the border, and would possibly attempt to cross to Ukraine.
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Semua "separatis" besenjata sekarang termasuk dalam kelompok tentara russia (reguler/bayaran) mengingat mereka sudah menyatakan bergabung dengan negara Federasi Russia.