An explosion that left at least one man dead and more than 30 people trapped today in a coal mine in war-torn eastern Ukraine was not caused by shelling, authorities say.

The blast, 3,280 ft underground at the Zasyadkov mine in Donestk – a city under the control of rebels from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) – is close to the conflict’s frontlines.

Rebel and government officials said that 230 men were working in the pit at the time of the explosion. Between 30 and 32 men were trapped, according to reports. One witness reported seeing five bodies.

Workers from other parts of the pit were enlisted to clear rubble. Operations were hampered, however, because one of the three entrances to the mine – the entrance closest to where the blast happened – has been forced closed by artillery shelling during fighting between rebel forces and the Ukrainian army.

The war in the region, now under a ceasefire brokered by European leaders, Moscow and Kiev, has claimed more than 6,000 lives.

Separatist authorities blamed the blast on a combustible mixture of methane and air, a common cause of industrial mining accidents.

A mine rescue services representative, Yuliana Bedilo, confirmed that one man had died. Rebel officials say 198 had been evacuated, but the fate of as many as 32 others remains unknown.

One injured miner, Igor Murygin, suffered burns over a fifth of his body and said he had been blown off his feet by the blast.

Speaking to reporters at a hospital in Donetsk, he said: “When I came to, there was dust everywhere. People were groaning.”

He added that the mine had newly installed equipment that appeared to be working normally.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Ukrainian prime minister, said in Kiev that rebels had prevented a team of 60 Ukrainian rescue workers from reaching the mine to provide assistance. But leading rebel representative Denis Pushilin denied that Ukrainian authorities had offered any help.

“If we truly need assistance, we will turn to Russia,” Pushilin was quoted as saying by the Donetsk News Agency.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4372164.ece

A Russian tank commander injured in battle has exposed his country’s involvement in Ukraine, amid US claims that the Kremlin has 12,000 troops fighting the Kiev government.

Speaking from a hospital bed in the rebel-held city of Donetsk, Dorzhi Batomunkuyev, 20, told a reporter from the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta that he had served in a rebel unit that was “90 per cent Russian”.

On February 19, the gunner and his comrades were engaged in combat with Ukrainian army tanks at Debaltseve, a key railway junction captured last week by the Russian-backed separatists.

“I hit an enemy tank, which exploded,” he told the paper. “Got on another tank, but . . . we pulled back to a different location and they shot us up.

“There was a deafening crash. I opened my eyes and could see only fire, a very bright light. I could hear the sound of cordite charges exploding.” The tank’s hatch would not open. He continued: “The only thought I had was that we would all die. I felt my face on fire, headset burning, I put my hand to take off the headset and saw, mixed with leather, skin from my hand.”

Rescued by comrades in an armoured car, Gunner Batomunkuyev was taken to an intensive care unit. Since his interview with the paper last week, he has been moved to a military hospital in Rostov, southern Russia.

Like all Russian regular soldiers fighting in Ukraine, Gunner Batomunkuyev volunteered to be sent there. He had signed up under a three-year contract last June after completing his service as a conscript. Some men refused to go to Ukraine and although he did not know their fate, he suggested they did not face punishment.

It was clear from the beginning last autumn, when preparations began for them to move out from their Siberian base to a collection point in the Rostov region, near Russia’s border with Ukraine, that secrecy was paramount: divisional signs on the battalion’s tanks were painted over, identifying uniform patches and badges removed and paybooks left behind at base.

Units from Siberia and Russia’s far east rolled through the vast country by rail, greeted by cheering locals at villages and towns.

His unit crossed the Ukrainian border under cover of darkness early last month and, after a stopover in Donetsk, began to fight its way to Debaltseve. Although he said that no one in his unit was killed in the fighting, he described men losing limbs and, like him, being burnt in tank battles.

He claims that they avoided contact with Ukrainian civilians and did their best to minimise casualties, although he nearly shot a woman wearing white, mistaking her for a Ukrainian soldier in winter camouflage.

He told the paper he had no regrets and did not blame President Putin, who continues to insist that Russia does not provide military help to the rebels.

“I have nothing against him,” the young soldier said with a laugh. “He is certainly an interesting person and cunning — telling the entire world there are ‘no troops here’.”

Ben Hodges, the US Army Europe commander, said that Russian forces in Ukraine consist of military advisers, weapons operators and combat troops. A further 50,000 are massed on the border, the general claimed. He has urged the White House to arm Kiev.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4372293.ece

Thousands of Russians queued for hours today in the raw Moscow cold to pay their final respects to the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

They shuffled past long lines of fur-hatted police, through airport-style metal detectors and behind ranks of television news reporters, including those from the pro-Kremlin channels whose vitriolic propaganda many of the mourners blamed for Nemtsov’s death.

Then they filed slowly, one by one, into the hall where the open coffin lay.

Four days after he was shot four times in the back while crossing a bridge below the Kremlin with his girlfriend, Nemtsov’s handsome features looked undisturbed in the white-lined casket .

His silver hair was neatly parted. He wore a white shirt, open at the collar, and a black suit. His fingers gripped a wooden cross. Black and white portraits of Nemtsov decorated the brick walls of the Sakharov Centre, a museum and cultural space commemorating the Soviet-era dissident and Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov.

Church music played in the background and the perfume of flowers laid by each of the mourners, mostly red carnations, filled the room. His mother, who turned 87 today and had feared that President Putin would have her son killed, listened with other family members to the eulogies. Nemtsov’s ex-wife Yekaterina Odintsova, with a black headscarf pulled over her blonde hair, stood near by.

Mr Putin has condemned the killing and taken personal charge of the investigation according to his spokesman. Opposition figurers have condemned the murder enquiry as a sham because it is not examining the possibility that the state security services were involved.

Russian state television has begun a multi-pronged backlash against suggestions that the Kremlin might be to blame for the crime, blaming western intelligence services, Islamic extremists, Ukrainian nationalists or the Russian opposition instead.

Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister under President Yeltsin, was the most prominent opposition figure to be murdered in Russia during Putin’s 15-year rule.

Mr Putin did not attend the ceremony and will not be at the burial service at a Moscow cemetery this afternoon. Arkady Dvorkovich, a deputy prime minister from the government’s increasingly sidelined liberal camp, represented the Russian authorities.

Representing Britain was John Major, the former prime minister, who was among the first dignitaries to arrive.

Outside light snow began to fall and the short speeches made next to the coffin were broadcast to those still waiting.

“The shots were fired not only at Nemtsov but at all of us, at democracy in Russia,” they heard Gennady Gudkov, another prominent Kremlin critic, say.

“We never thought this could happen, but it did. Rest in peace my friend, your work will be continued.”

Sleek diplomatic cars flying the flags of the United Kingdom, European Union, France, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Romania and Norway filled the road.

By noon, the queue of people wanting to lay flowers at Nemtsov’s coffin snaked all the way back up the hill to the Kursk railway station, almost half a mile away, and was still growing.

“Nemtsov’s death was a case where I couldn’t just look away or cross the road and walk on the other side of the pavement,” said Irina Shebanova, a retired school teacher who came from Tver, 150km (93 miles) north of Moscow, to pay her respects.

Sergei Larin, a small businessman who said he was “only just breathing” after 15 years of President Putin’s repressive rule, described Nemtsov’s killing as the crossing of a new frontier of cruelty and cynicism.

“There has been a long list of killings before,” he said, “but to shoot a former member of the government right by the Kremlin … It’s complete rubbish to say that it was done to discredit Putin. There were clear, direct threats to Nemtsov. From extremists? What extremists? Putin controls and feeds all the extremists in the world, and by the way from our taxpayers’ money.”

Yelena Barkova, 41, an election co-ordinator, said opposition followers had often declared that Russia had reached a “turning point” before, but Nemtsov’s murder was definitely it. “It marks the start of Terror.”

Pavel Volkov, a physicist, said there had been no need for Mr Putin to give any direct order himself to kill Nemtsov because the atmosphere of hatred, whipped up by state propaganda, was enough. “Anger in society is off the scale,” he said. “We are living in a nightmare. I worry most of all for my children and grandchildren.”

Lyudmila and Alla, two pensioners who came together, were too frightened to give their surnames. “This murder shows what the powers that be are capable of,” said Lyudmila. “Citizens should investigate the killing themselves because we cannot believe the investigators.”

“I feel this very bitterly,” said Alla, “the shooting shows that it is deadly dangerous to be in opposition. We live in a concentration camp, ruled by the KGB.”

Pasha, 24, an urban studies analyst with a long hipster beard, said that Nemtsov had seemed out of date to him but that he admired his energy and optimism. “He was the guy from the 90s but still he was cool – he had some passion.”

Ilya Shepelin, a journalist with the independent magazine Bolshoi Gorod, said: “I was a critic of Nemtsov before but his murder united us.” When street demonstrations flared against Mr Putin in 2011-12, partly organised by Nemtsov, there was a belief that Russia could change. Now, with every prominent opposition leader jailed, in exile or dead, “people don’t know what to do … people have no hope”.

Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite turned opposition figure and journalist, tweeted that she had received a grim message after viewing the body. A man had walked up to her and said: “Bear in mind, you’re next Ksenia.”

The girlfriend of Boris Nemtsov spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the moment the opposition leader was shot dead as they crossed a bridge together near the Kremlin.

Anna Duritskaya, a Ukrainian model who had been with the former deputy prime minister and critic of President Putin for 2½ years, said that she never saw the killer and expressed dismay that the Russian authorities were refusing to let her go home to Kiev.

Speaking in a faltering voice drained of emotion, she told the online independent news channel Dozhd that she had noticed nothing suspicious over dinner in a restaurant overlooking Red Square late on Friday, or as they strolled downhill to the river, towards Mr Nemtsov’s home.

Then “on the bridge the murder happened”.

“I don’t want to answer questions about what happened on the bridge. I don’t want to talk about this,” she said. “I am in a very difficult psychological condition and I cannot talk about this any more now. I feel bad… I saw no one. I don’t know where he came from, [the killer] was behind my back.

“I turned around and all I saw was a light-coloured car. I saw neither the brand nor the licence plate of the car when it was driving away.”

Mr Nemtsov, 55, died almost instantly. Ms Duritskaya, who is more than 30 years younger than her partner, was taken away by police and interrogated without a lawyer.

“They questioned me until morning. I don’t remember where,” she said. “Some time later, several hours into the questioning, I asked to call a lawyer and the Ukrainian embassy consul.”

She said that she had given all the evidence she could yet was still kept under constant guard for several days.

However, a few hours after the interview appeared, Ms Duritskaya was allowed to leave Moscow and fly home to Ukraine. She will be a notable absentee at Mr Nemtsov’s funeral today, in common with Alexei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader, and Bogdan Borusewicz, the leader of the Polish Senate, who said last night that he had been denied entry to Russia.

Another mourner, the Latvian MEP Sandra Kalniete, was spending the night at a Moscow airport after immigration officials refused to let her into the country. Ms Kalniete, a former foreign minister, said she would fly back to Brussels today.

The British government will be represented at the funeral by the former prime minister Sir John Major.

There were conflicting reports yesterday as to whether the closed-circuit television cameras covering the site of the killing were working at the time of the attack. The business newspaper Kommersant, citing an anonymous interior ministry source, said that they were not, although the Moscow city authorities later said that the cameras were working and that there were others operated by federal security.

The newspaper said that investigators were sure that “the killers were not professionals”, that they used old ammunition and possibly an unreliable home-made weapon of the type used in 2006 to kill Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist and critic of the Kremlin.

The website Life News, which has close links to the security services, reported that the murderer was about 1.7m (5ft 7in) with short dark hair, wearing blue jeans and a brown sweater.

Late on Sunday, after tens of thousands of Russian protesters had shuffled through the drizzle to the spot where Mr Nemtsov was murdered, an unusual guest was invited on to Russian state television’s most popular weekly news and current affairs show.

Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, another critic of Mr Putin who was poisoned with polonium 210 in London in 2006, said that Mr Nemtsov’s murder was a carefully planned “provocation” organised by MI6 and other Western intelligence services.

Mr Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, is now a member of the State Duma, where he represents the ultra-nationalist LDPR. He told Russian TV that he was “convinced that preparations for killing Nemtsov began at least a year ago as part of a strategic plan [aiming for a] strategic outcome in Russia linked to Ukraine”.

“This may not be the end, but the beginning of provocations,” he warned viewers. “It is all part of a geopolitical game of western intelligence services.”

No explanation was given for Mr Lugovoi’s presence on the show and there was no mention of evidence allegedly linking him to Mr Litvinenko’s death. His place was later taken in the 145-minute-long panel discussion programme by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the LDPR, who recently suggested attacking Kiev with napalm.

Many leading figures from the Moscow intelligentsia had refused to appear on Sunday’s show. “Close friends and associates who knew Boris Nemtsov well were being called all day Saturday by researchers from the show, but none of them agreed to go on it,” a source told The Times, adding that they considered the programme a propaganda mouthpiece for Kremlin-approved views.

In Geneva yesterday Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, promised that the murder would be “fully investigated”, although he added that any “attempt to use the heinous killing of Boris Nemtsov for political purposes is despicable”.