MOSCOW, June 4. /TASS/. Hostilities flared up along the line of disengagement in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region earlier this week. The conflicting parties blame each other for the renewed fire exchanges. The Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has dismissed the rumors it had launched a massive offensive against the positions of the Ukrainian military. Kiev has accused Russia of disrupting the Minsk Accords and demanded putting pressures on the militias.
Over the less than four months since the conclusion of a second truce in Minsk combat operations in Donbas have not stopped altogether for a single day, but the hostilities that erupted late at night on Tuesday were so strong that many analysts started wondering if it was a temporary aggravation or evidence a full-scale war is underway again.
The leading research fellow of the Social Sciences Institute at the presidential academy RANEPA, Sergey Bespalov, believes that Kiev is hardly interested in a resumption of large-scale combat operations, but at the same time it would like to make the militias and Russia, allegedly present behind all of their actions, look as the ones responsible for the current aggravation. By doing so it pursues very certain aims.
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"Foreign sponsors have to be addressed with a reminder from time to time that Ukraine is a warring country and deserves continued assistance," Bespalov told TASS. "It is very desirable to draw the attention of G7 summit participants and to make Ukraine a key theme. Besides, the European Union will soon be considering the question whether to prolong the sanctions against Russia. Kiev would like to rule out a situation where the question of easing or lifting sanctions might be raised."
"The main reason behind the aggravation is Kiev’s refusal to comply with the Minsk Accords," the director of the CIS Countries Institute, Konstantin Zatulin, told TASS. "Kiev is responsible for it first and foremost. Also, one should remember that in this situation provocations have become more frequent. Who was the first to attack is a very practical question, but the outcome could have been different. Nothing of the sort could have happened without a decision by the Ukrainian leadership. Surely it was not a spontaneous improvisation," he said.
Zatulin sees no reasons for linking the current events with the international context.
"In the existing situation it could have happened any moment. The authorities in Kiev are balancing on the brink of a civil war in order to maintain hysteria in society and to quash any manifestations of social protest."
"The current clashes are unlikely to result in a major war. Everything will be over before long," an expert at the Centre of Political Technologies, Georgy Chizhov, told TASS.
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