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Crew of Russian TV channel comes under gunfire by Ukrainian military in Donbass

The crew had left the zone of the incident and had moved to a safe area

DONETSK, January 29. /TASS/. A crew of the Russian TV channel NTV came under gunfire opened by the Ukrainian military on Sunday in the city of Makeyevka on the territory of the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic, reporter Danil Levin told the Donetsk News Agency.

"Around 14:00 hours when we were filming interviews with local residents in the districts of Makeyevka shelled by the Ukrainian military on Saturday, gunfire began anew," he said. "There were many local residents around us and everyone had to fall to the ground."

"By the time of reporting, the crew had left the zone of the incident and had moved to a safe area," the agency said.

Earlier on Sunday, the operations command of the Donetsk Republic said the Ukrainian military had opened fire targeting Makeyevka, once in the past a major center of Ukrainian steel smelting. Two residential buildings were damaged and one was fully ruined as a result.

Also on Sunday, a resident of Donetsk was wounded when the pro-Kiev units opened gunfire at the city, Ruslan Yakubov, the chief of staff of the Donetsk republic's operations command told the Donetsk News Agency.

"A shell hit a car repair workshop on Kuibyshev Street and wounded a peaceful civilian," he told the Donetsk News Agency.

Eduard Basurin, the official spokesman for the operations command of the republic’s self-defense forces, said that on the whole the Ukrainian armed units had shelled the populated localities in different parts of the republic

"The criminal Ukrainian forces have violated the ceasefire arrangements on 1,049 occasions in the past twenty-four hours," he said. "The enemy units launched fourteen artillery shells at the areas near the frontline, including eight 152 mm shells, ten tank shells, 367 mortar mines, of which 145 mines had the 120 mm caliber, and 583 projectiles from grenade launchers of various types."

Basurin also said that the pro-Kiev units had used infantry combat vehicles and small arms.

The biggest intensity of shelling was registered in the townships of Trudovskoye, Aleksandrovka and Staromikhailovka adjoining Donetsk in the west.

In the Yasinovataya district, the shelling was most intense in the villages of Spartak, Vassilyevka and Krutaya Balka. In addition, high intensity of shelling was reported in a number of places in the Novoazovsk district in the south of the Donetsk republic, in the town of Dokuchayevsk and in the suburbs of Gorlovka.

"An investigative group has recorded all the crimes committed by the Ukrainian command and we'll report them to a commission for investigation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces crimes and to the special monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe."

Defense and security agencies of the republic said earlier the pro-Kiev units had launched 265 tank projectiles, artillery shells and mines at the republic's populated localities along the entire line of contact, which separates the forces of the parties to the armed civil conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Electricity outages occurred in six villages in the south of the republic

Members of the Ukraine Contact Group that is seeking settlement to the conflict in Donbass reached agreement at a regular meeting in Minsk on December 21 to introduce a comprehensive and all-embracing ceasefire in the zone of conflict as of December 24. The December arrangement marked a tenth attempt to introduce a ceasefire since the autumn of 2014 but the number of cases of shelling on the part of the pro-Kiev armed units increased again after several days of a lull.