MOSCOW, August 9. /TASS/. Kiev’s military are shelling heavily Ukraine’s Gorlovka; at least one civilian is killed, the city’s Mayor Roman Khromenkov said on Sunday.

"One civilian was killed in the Zaitsevo settlement as the Ukrainian armed forces were shelling Gorlovka," the Donetsk News Agency quoted him. "We are trying to get more detailed information, but this is not possible due to the continuing fire."

The shelling continues already for an hour and a half, the city administration says.

Previous night, "at about 03:30a.m. Ukraine’s Armed Forces began shelling, which continued for about an hour," the mayor said. "The shelling destroyed an electric station which supplied electricity to a big part of the city. Thus, water supplies have stopped."

The Defence Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) says Gorlovka has been shelled regularly. From January 2015, the city administration says, 164 civilians have been killed, including 16 children. Another 501 people have got injuries. About 2,000 houses have been ruined.

Situation around Ukraine’s Donbass

On April 7, 2014, the then Ukraine’s acting president Alexander Turchinov announced plans to launch an "anti-terrorist operation" in the country’s eastern regions that disagreed with the Kiev authorities’ policy. By summer 2014, clashes between Ukrainian army and local militias grew into large-scale combat operations involving heavy weapons and warplanes. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the violence in Ukraine has killed 6,500 people in the past year, wounded 16,000 and left 5 million people in need of humanitarian aid. With more than 1.3 million registered IDPs, Ukraine has now the ninth largest number of internally displaced in the world, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

The Minsk accords were signed on February 12, 2015 after 14-hour negotiations between the leaders of Normandy Four (Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko) in the Belarusian capital city of Minsk. Concurrently, Minsk hosted a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukrainian settlement.

A 13-point Package of Measures on implementation of the September 2014 Minsk agreements in particular included an agreement on cessation of fire from February 15, withdrawal of heavy armaments, as well as measures on long-term political settlement of the situation in Ukraine, including establishment of working subgroups as priority tasks.

However, the ceasefire has been violated repeatedly. The self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk have repeatedly said the ceasefire observation depends completely on the Ukrainian side.