All news

Acting DPR culture minister: local history museum in Donetsk destroyed during hostilities

DONETSK, October 2. /TASS/. The local history museum in Donetsk was completely destroyed when the eastern Ukrainian city - the capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) - was shelled, acting DPR Culture Minister Yury Lekstutes said Thursday.

Lekstutes said his department is pushing for creation of a big museum complex and a cultural center in the former building of Ukraine’s coal industry.

“Overall, we have 25 museums in the republic. Some of them could receive premises there,” he said.

Clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics, have claimed some 3,500 lives, according to the UN, forced hundreds of thousands to flee Ukraine’s embattled southeast and caused massive destruction.

Talks mediated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk saw the parties to the Ukrainian conflict agree on cessation of fire and exchange of prisoners two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed his plan to settle the situation in the east of Ukraine.

The ceasefire took effect the same day but reports said it has occasionally been violated.