MOSCOW, November 9. /TASS/. Head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko said the authorities know names of all Ukrainian gunners who conducted shelling of Donetsk on the day, where a shell hit a school killing two children.
“We know names of all commanders of artillery and mortar batteries, even down to the commanders of gun crews. We know their names and last names… Now we shall find out names of soldiers,” he said on Sunday in an interview with LifeNews. “We shall identify everyone. They will be brought to responsibility.”
Earlier on Sunday, Eduard Basurin of the DPR’s defence ministry said they will insist on the international court proceedings against Ukrainian gunners, who had shelled Donetsk.
“An international tribunal should bring them to responsibility as war criminals,” he said adding the DPR was ready to cooperate with international institutions like the UN to bring to responsibility the Ukrainian military involved in shelling of the city.
On Wednesday, November 5, two children were killed in a shelling of Donetsk. On Thursday, Russia’s Investigative Committee said it was launching criminal proceedings over school shelling in Donetsk, interpreting it as an international crime. Investigators said servicemen of Ukraine’s armed forces and national guard, on an order from their commanders and Defense Ministry, army and national guard officials, carried out an aimed artillery shelling of high school No. 63 on Stepanenko Street in Donetsk.
Later, Russia’s ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Andrei Kelin told TASS the Organisation confirmed the shelling of the school in Donetsk was delivered from positions of the Ukrainian military, while the Ukrainian side tried to fabricate proofs of its non-involvement.
“The report contains facts. The facts prove that the shelling was made from artillery from the direction and distance, which no doubt is at location of the Ukrainian military near the airport and the settlement of Peski,” he said.
“On Thursday, at the meeting of OSCE permanent council, Ukrainian diplomats presented pictures with television footage, where, they claimed, the drawn dots traced the shelling had been made from quite the opposite direction, from the eastern one, where the militia are,” he said. “That was a very prompt fabrication made within hours of the tragedy - a useless attempt to make others responsible.”
According to the UN, more than 4,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, conducted since mid-April, to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics.
The parties to the Ukrainian conflict agreed on a ceasefire at OSCE-mediated talks on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk 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 has reportedly occasionally been violated.
On September 19 in Minsk, the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine comprising representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE adopted a memorandum outlining the parameters for the implementation of commitments on the ceasefire in Ukraine laid down in the Minsk Protocol of September 5.
The document contains nine points, including in particular a ban on the use of all armaments and withdrawal of weapons with the calibres of over 100 millimetres to a distance of 15 kilometres from the contact line from each side. The OSCE was tasked with controlling the implementation of memorandum provisions.