Moscow/Kiev (Alliance News) - Ukraine conceded on Wednesday that a Russian aid convoy could pass its border in a rebel-held zone near the embattled city of Luhansk.

The aid can go through a border post close to Luhansk, if it is scanned by Ukrainian customs and representatives of the Organization of Security and Co-operation (OSCE), President Petro Poroshenko's spokesman Sviatoslav Tseholko said.

The comments mean that Kiev backtracked from its previous demand that the Russian aid must cross the border near the city of Kharkiv after the truckloads have been transferred to vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The east Ukrainian Kharkiv region is controlled by government forces, while the shorter route to Luhansk leads through Russia's Rostov region, where some border posts are controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Facebook that the Russian convoy would not be allowed to enter the Kharkiv region. "A provocation by the cynical aggressor on our territory is unacceptable," Avakov wrote on Facebook.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk insisted earlier that Ukraine will accept foreign humanitarian aid only from the Red Cross.

But Tseholko said that Moscow had refused to have the aid shipment transferred to Red Cross lorries at the border and let it be delivered only by ICRC staff.

The spokesman said that the ICRC should only distribute the aid in Luhansk, where more than 200,000 civilians have been without water and electricity for 11 days.

The ICRC did not immediately comment on the situation on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian government has suggested that the Russians could be supplying arms to separatists, under the guise of supplying 2,000 tons of food and medicine to civilians in the rebel-held areas.

Tseholko said that "a direct invasion under the pretext of delivering humanitarian aid" was a possible scenario.

Russia dispatched the convoy of some 280 white lorries with humanitarian aid on Tuesday from what was believed to be a military base south of Moscow.

Russian state media reported early Wednesday that the convoy had left the city of Voronezh and headed to the Belgorod region, which borders Kharkiv.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the convoy was moving on Russian territory. "Everything is happening under full compliance and under the auspices of the Red Cross," he was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency.

Putin met with senior security officials in Crimea on Wednesday. He is expected to make a speech on Ukraine on Thursday on the Black Sea peninsula, whose annexation by Russia in March triggered the worst crisis with the West since the end of the Cold War.

Ukraine announced that it would send a convoy of its own to the conflict zone. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk said that his country was able to feed its own people and does not need foreign aid. He announced that the government had set aside another 10 million hryvna (760,000 dollars) for the aid shipment.

Fighting in eastern Ukraine continued meanwhile. Eleven soldiers were killed and 41 injured over the past 24 hours, according to military spokesman Andriy Lysenko.

The United Nations said Wednesday that the overall death toll in eastern Ukraine climbed to at least 2,086.

The figure accounts for Ukrainian soldiers, pro-Russian rebels and civilians killed between mid-April, when the fighting began, and August 10, said a spokeswoman of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"We have seen an escalation," spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly said, adding that the average daily number of casualties has climbed to 70, up from 60 in previous months.

The death toll is nearly double the figure that the UN had cited in late July, but Pouilly stressed that the new estimate includes earlier deaths that had not been reported previously.

Copyright dpa