Ukrainian military responsible for four violations of ceasefire — Lugansk militia

Ukrainian fighters over past 24 hours violated the ceasefire regime four times and made five provocations, the militia of the Lugansk People’s Republic [LPR] said on Saturday.

“At 3 at night, Kiev’s military fired on Veselaya Gora; at 9:52p.m. they fired from a machine-gun from Popasnaya on Molodezhnoye,” the LuhanskInformCentre quoted a representative of the militia.

The republic’s defence ministry said Kiev’s military had organised several provocations.

“At 6:25 p.m. near Nizhneye (controlled by Kiev)we fixed an explosion from a 120-mm mortar or self-propelled artillery,” the representative said. “The fire was made from the Krymskoye settlement.”

Minsk accords on settlement of crisis in Ukraine

A peace deal struck on February 12 in Minsk, Belarus, by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and people’s militias starting from February 15, followed by withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of military engagement and prisoner release.

The package of measures envisages the pullback of all heavy weapons by both parties to locations equidistant from the disengagement line in order to create a security zone at least 50 kilometres wide for artillery systems with a calibre of 100 mm or more, a zone of security 70 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers and a zone 140 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers Tornado-S, Uragan and Smerch and for Tochka-U tactical rocket systems.

The Ukrainian forces and the self-defence forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.

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.