(Reuters) - Pro-Russian rebels shot down a Ukrainian helicopter in fierce fighting near the eastern town of Slaviansk on Monday, and Kiev drafted police special forces to the southwestern port city of Odessa to halt a feared westward spread of rebellion.

Ukraine said the Odessa force, based on "civil activists", would replace local police who had failed to tackle rebel actions at the weekend. Its dispatch was a clear signal from Kiev that, while tackling rebellion in the east, it would vigorously resist any sign of a slide to a broader civil war.

Odessa, with its ethnic mix from Russians to Ukrainians, Georgians to Tatars a cultural contrast to the pro-Russian east, was quiet on Monday. Ukrainian flags flew at half mast for funerals of some of the dozens killed in clashes on Friday.

But in the east, fighting intensified around the pro-Russian stronghold of Slaviansk, a city of 118,000, where rebel fighters ambushed Ukrainian forces early in the day.

The Interior Ministry said five Ukrainian paramilitary police were killed. Separatists said four of their number had also been killed. ...

The self-declared pro-Russian mayor of Slaviansk Vyacheslav Ponomarev told Reuters by telephone: "(The Ukrainians) are reinforcing, deploying ever more forces here. Recently there was a parachute drop... For us, they are not military, but fascists."

Ukraine's Defence Ministry said rebels had shot down a Ukrainian military helicopter, the fourth since Friday, with heavy machine gun fire. The helicopter crashed into a river and the crew were rescued alive, but there were no details of their condition.

Diana, 15, who lives near Slaviansk in a single-storey house at the strategic junction of the road between Kharkiv and Rostov, said she saw Ukrainian tanks fire on rebel cars. A fuel tank at a petrol station exploded and fighters fired at houses.

"My father was injured in the head by glass splinters. It's terrifying. There's just nowhere to live now. Everything is broken, our television, our computer; they shot at our car."

http://uk.reuters.co...KBN0DL11J20140505

It would seem things are getting a tad worse.

We (using NATO) are sabre rattling like I haven't seen since Reagan. I do not underestimate Russian pride. What is it they say, "Pride goeth before the fall"? I think we underestimate how much this situation is about pride at our (and the world's) peril. People are dying. We and They need to ratchet down the Cold War rhetoric before this situation blows up to the point where neither of us individually (nor collectively) can handle it. What the world truly needs right now is a Kruschev. But, there aren't any left, I'm afraid.

I'm fairly confident there will be significant bloodshed.