LUGANSK, November 19. /TASS/. Units of the Ukrainian military over the past 24 hours six times opened fire on militia positions in the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), the republic’s defense authority said on Saturday.
"On the area near the Kalinovka settlement they opened fire from 122mm artillery and from 82mm mortars from the direction of Luganskoye and Mironovsky," LuganskInformCenter quoted the authority.
Under fire from positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were also settlements Zheltoye, Kalinovo, the area of the monument to Prince Igor. A shell from a 152mm artillery system was launched on Lugansk from the direction of Kondrashevskaya Novaya rail station.
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 Ukrainian side keeps on shelling DPR’s settlements. The DPR has been daily reporting more than 100 episodes of shelling with the use of weapons of 120mm and 122mm caliber.
Despite the ongoing provocations, the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and LPR, on September 13 banned their servicemen to open retaliatory fire in response to provocations from Ukrainian troops. On the following day, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after talks in Kiev that Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko had also guaranteed Ukraine’s readiness to observe truce in Donbass.
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.