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Ceasefire regime holds in Donbas overnight

According to the local administration, everything was calm and quiet at night

MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. No ceasefire violations by Ukrainian forces along the contact line Donbas were registered overnight, local administrations said on Tuesday.

"Everything was quiet and calm at night," head of Donetsk’s Petrovsky district administration Maxim Zhukovsky told Donetsk News Agency.

Donetsk’s Kuybyshevsky and Kirovsky districts confirmed that no shellings were registered overnight.

The ceasefire regime was observed overnight in the settlements of Makeyevka, Yasinovataya and Gorlovka, along with Donetsk’s Novoazovsky, Amvrosievsky, Telmanovsky and Starobeshevsky districts.

At the meeting of the Contact Group in Minsk on August 26, the participants confirmed their plans to ensure ceasefire in Donbas from September 1. Over the last weeks DPR defense ministry registered the growing number of shellings near Gorlovka and in Donetsk’s northern and western outskirts. Deputy Chief Monitor of the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Alexander Hug said that Donetsk’s outskirts and Gorlovka remain the "hot spots" on the contact line in Donbass.

The Minsk accords were signed on February 12, after negotiations in the so-called "Normandy format" in the Belarusian capital Minsk, bringing together Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

The Minsk accords envisage ceasefire, weaponry withdrawal, prisoner exchange, local election in Donbas, constitutional reform in Ukraine and establishing working sub-groups on security, political, economy and humanitarian components of the Minsk accords.

The Ukrainian forces and the self-defense forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.