DONETSK, March 12. /TASS/. The village of Kominternovo in the south of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) has been left without gas supplies as the local gas pipeline was damaged in shelling by Ukrainian troops, the chief of the local administration, Igor Podgorny, said on Sunday.
"Today in the afternoon, the village of Kominternovo came under shelling. As a result, the gas pipeline was damaged and people have been left without gas supplies. No information is available about casualties," the Donetsk News Agency quoted him as saying.
Meanwhile, according to the local administration, gas supplies to Kominternovo were resumed on Saturday after Friday’s shelling by Ukrainian troops.
Earlier on Sunday, the DPR’s operations command said that about 1,200 mines and shells had been fired by Ukrainian troops at DPR’s settlement in the past day. Four houses in Gorlovka’s, Yasinovataya’s and Dokuchayevsk’s suburbs had been damaged.
Since autumn 2014, the Contact Group on the settlement in Donbass has agreed more than ten ceasefires but none lasted for long, with Ukrainian troops repeatedly breaking them down and opening fire at the DPR’s territories from heavy weapons that are to have been withdrawn from the line of engagement in line with the Minsk agreements.
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.