MOSCOW, December 16. /TASS/. Ukraine’s forces on Thursday used a longer-range counterpart of the multiple launch rocket system Grad BM-21, manufactured in Slovakia, Lieutenant-Colonel Andrey Bayevsky, of the Donetsk people’s militia, said on Friday.

"The Slovak system RM-70 was used. It is not an ordinary BM-21 Grad, but its upgrade. Its 20-kilogram high explosive fragmentation warhead is about 10% heavier than the ordinary one. These rockets have a longer range, about 24 kilometers," Bayevsky said on Russia’s TV Channel One.

Bayevsky added that the positions that the Ukrainian forces had used for shelling Donetsk until recently were no longer safe. New ones farther away had to be looked for.

On Thursday morning, Donetsk came under the strongest bombardment ever since 2014. A total of 40 MLRS rockets crashed on the Voroshilovsky and Kievsky districts of the city. Later, Igor Kimakovsky, an adviser to the acting head of the Donetsk People’s Republic said that Donetsk had been attacked with a Czech MLRS, an upgrade of the Soviet-designed Grad system.