DONETSK, November 26. /TASS/. The Ukrainian military over the past 24 hours opened fire more than 1,600 times on settlements of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), spokesman of the command Eduard Basurin told the Donetsk News Agency on Sunday.
"The situation in DPR remains tense, as over the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian militants 1,619 times violated the ceasefire regime," the agency quoted him. "DPR’s one serviceman was killed and another one got injured."
The spokesman said, from positions of the military had been launched 72 artillery shells of 152 and 122mm calibers, 622 mines of 82 and 120mm calibers. Five houses were damaged.
Under the fire were settlements Yasinovataya, Lebyazhye, Krutaya Balka, Zhabichevo, Spartak, Zaitsevo, Dokuchayevsk, Alexandrovka, Trudovskiye, , Leninskoye, Sakhanka, Bezymennoye, Kominternovo and Sosnovskoye.
On August 26, the parties to the Contact Group for settling the armed civil conflict in eastern Ukraine made a yet another, ninth, attempt to attain ceasefire. The agreement they reached suggests the ceasefire takes effect as of September 1. However, the Ukrainian side keeps on shelling DPR’s settlements. The DPR has been daily reporting more than 100 episodes of shelling with the use of weapons of 120mm and 122mm calibers.
Despite the ongoing provocations, the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics, the DPR and LPR (Lugansk People’s Republic), on September 13 banned their servicemen to open retaliatory fire in response to provocations from Ukrainian troops. On the following day, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after talks in Kiev that Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko had also guaranteed Ukraine’s readiness to observe truce in Donbass.
The Package of Measures to fulfil the September 2014 Minsk agreements, known as Minsk-2, that was signed in Minsk on February 12, 2015, envisaged a ceasefire regime between Ukrainian government forces and people’s militias in the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk (DPR and LPR) starting from February 15, 2015, and a subsequent withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of engagement. The deal also laid out a roadmap for a lasting settlement in Ukraine, including local elections and constitutional reform to give more autonomy to the war-torn eastern regions.