The situation in Donetsk is currently extremely tense, with hostilities centering in the northwest of the city - in Kyivsky and Kuibyshevsky neighborhoods, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reported.
According to eyewitnesses, local residents, who have not had the time
to leave their flats, are currently in the city’s bomb shelters.
Explosions are constantly audible in Donetsk.
There have been disruptions in signal reception, there are no
transport links in the neighborhoods, and local taxi firms are not even
taking orders to these parts of the city.
Meanwhile, spokesman for the National Security and Defense Council
(NSDC) Andriy Lysenko said the government forces are only fighting just
outside Donetsk, where efforts are under way to unblock access to the
city and destroy pro-Russian militants’ roadblocks.
“If explosions occur in the city center, this is definitely not the
Ukrainian military – there has been an order not to carry out aerial
strikes and artillery strikes in the residential areas of the city,”
Lysenko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Monday.
He has not ruled out that militias in Donetsk and Luhansk could be fighting “self-organized groups of local residents.”
