DONETSK, December 12. /TASS/. A group of Russian journalists came under shelling by Ukrainian troops in the village of Sakhanka in the south of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Ilya Ushenin, an NTV reporter, said on Monday.
"We were near a school when heavy machinegun fire was opened at us. Apart from that, we heard the spurts of automatic gunfire," the Donetsk News Agency quoted him as saying.
According to the journalist, the shelling began as soon as monitors of the OSCE monitoring mission had left the village.
The group of journalists included teams from Russian television channels Rossiya, NTV, Channel One and Fifth Channel, as well as reporters from the local television channels Oplot and Union. Spokesman for the DPR operations command Eduard Basurin also came under shelling.
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 security situation in Donbass has not visibly improved, with the parties continuing to exchange accusations of ceasefire violations.
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.