All news

UN secretary general concerned over conflict escalation in eastern Ukraine

Ban Ki-moon was concerned over growing intensity of fighting

UNITED NATIONS, February 5. /TASS/. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday he was concerned over growing intensity of fighting in eastern Ukraine.

He told journalists we was worried over both parties’ reinforcing their forces with heavy weapons. Apart from that, he expressed concern over the lack of progress in the settlement of the protracted conflict in Syria and over the situation in Libya, Yemen and in other hotbeds of tension.

On Wednesday, Russia’s permanent representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe /OSCE/ Andrei Kelin said Kiev was trying again to solve the conflict in Ukraine by military means, although the first attempt to do that in the summer of 2014 had failed. "We only hear calls - to crush, crush, crush, which, it seems, are inspired by a big country located overseas," Kelin told the Russia 24 television channel. "Armaments are being accumulated along the separation line, the economy is being militarized, mobilization is underway. We hear endless calls on Western countries, first of all on Americans, to supply them with arms."

Meanwhile, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission /SMM/ to Ukraine on Wednesday published a regular report on the situation in Ukraine, where it informed about more instances of the Ukrainian army’s using cliser bombs in shelling of settlements in Donbass. This conclusion was made after the mission’s visit to the town of Komsomolsk that had been heavily shelled on February 2. A day before that, the OSCE said 300-calibre cluster munitions had been used to shell Lugansk on January 27.

Eduard Basurin, a spokesman for the defence ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic /DPR/, on Wednesday informed about loss of human lives in the shelling of Donetsk. He said over 24 hours six civilians had been killed and 28 had received wounds.