Ukraine calls snap election as Russian tanks 'cross border'

Ukraine's president has dissolved parliament and called a snap election for October, while his country continues to battle pro-Russian rebels in the east of Ukraine.

Petro Poroshenko announced the move ahead a high-stakes summit meeting later today with President Putin, who stands accused of backing the separatist militia.

Yesterday the Ukrainian military said that a column of Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles had crossed into the country.

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Colonel Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's National Security Council, said that ten tanks, two armoured vehicles and two trucks crossed the border away from where the most intense fighting was taking place near Shcherbak, Time reports.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he had no information about the movement of a military column into Ukraine.

According to The Independent, the reported border incursion and shelling in the nearby city of Novoazovsk from Russia "could indicate an attempt to move on Mariupol, a major port on the Azov Sea, an arm of the Black Sea".

The movement was made to look like an attack by rebels, Lysenko said, but was actually "an attempt by the Russian military in the guise of Donbas fighters to open a new area of military confrontation".

Mariupol lies on the road between Rostov-on-Don in Russia and Simferopol in Crimea, and could be the first step towards "building a slice of territory that links Russia with Crimea," Time suggests.

Poroshenko will meet Putin today in Minsk, alongside other EU leaders, to discuss the best way to resolve the crisis.

The Ukrainian president said elections, which will be held on 26 October, will be "the best way of cleaning things up". Too many of deposed president Viktor Yanukovych's political allies remain in power, he said.