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DPR says two residents, serviceman killed in Ukrainian army shelling

Monday, 28 December 2015 6:51 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 28 December 2015 6:51 PM ]

This AFP photo taken on January 30, 2015 shows residents take cover during a shelling in a residential area in Donetsk's Kyibishevsky district in eastern Ukraine.

Pro-Russia forces in east Ukraine say shelling by Ukrainian military forces in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) killed two civilians and a serviceman last week.

"The armed forces have committed 14 violations in the DPR over the past day. Kominternove, Zhabunki, Nova Laspa, Zaitseve and the Donetsk airport have been shelled," Eduard Basurin, a senior official with the DPR Defense Ministry, told reporters on Monday.

Basurin added that Ukrainian military forces violated the ceasefire between the two sides 58 times last week and fired 443 shells and more than 40 projectiles from a tank and a grenade launcher.

He added that during the same period, "The losses among servicemen are, one killed and [another] one wounded last week, two civilians were killed and three [more] were wounded last week. A civilian was wounded in Zaitseve, another one in Dokuchayevsk and one more (in the direction of the south)."

Kiev is deploying heavy military hardware, including BM-21 Grad rocket launchers, and self-propelled artillery weapons, in all directions that has also been recorded in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission reports, Basurin said, adding that along with the military hardware, the Ukrainian military is also dispatching foreign mercenaries to the contact line.

"Some 200 foreign mercenaries, with the insignia of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, arrived at the Artemivsk settlement," he added.

This as on Sunday, military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk claimed that pro-Russia forces had deployed light weapons, grenade launchers, machine guns, mortar launchers, and a tank to the frontline breaching the truce agreement.

This AFP photo taken on January 29, 2015 shows a woman in DPR's Kyibishevsky district begging on her knees to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to stop the shelling in Donetsk

The escalation comes despite the fact that the two sides renewed pledge on September 1 to implement a ceasefire agreement that had been reached through international mediation in the Belarusian capital city of Minsk in February.

The conflict in Ukraine broke out in March 2014 following a referendum in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, in which people voted overwhelmingly for reunification with Russia.

The situation, however, degenerated into a major armed conflict after Kiev dispatched troops to Lugansk and Donetsk in April 2014 in an attempt to suppress pro-Russia forces there.

Some 8,000 people have been killed and almost 18,000 injured since the beginning of the conflict, according to UN figures.

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