A decision to suspend the withdrawal of weapons of less than 100mm caliber from the contact line in Donbas following Wednesday's shelling of a Ukrainian army checkpoint near the village of Troitske, Luhansk region, has not been made so far, Ukrainian presidential administration spokesman for the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) in Donbas Andriy Lysenko has said.
“Yesterday’s incident has been assessed as a provocation. It was not of a massive and offensive nature. It was a shelling incident. Regrettably, our servicemen were hurt. But, so far, a decision to suspend the implementation of the Minsk agreements has not been made,” he told a press briefing in Kyiv on Oct. 8.
This provocation prompted a decision to call an emergency meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine “to discuss what happened and formulate practical measures to prevent similar incidents in the future,” Lysenko said.
“The [weapons] pullback process continues today. It is today that the verification of withdrawn weapons is taking place at the sites in the presence of the OSCE SMM (Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). If a decision is adopted to go ahead the withdrawal of weapons, which depends on a decision to be made by the Trilateral Contact Group, will continue in accordance with the schedule compiled by the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces,” the spokesman said.
The incident in Troitske village will be addressed at the highest levels, “and we will try to make sure that such incidents never happen again,” he said.
No violations of the ceasefire have been reported in the Ukrainian army operation area in eastern Ukraine over the past 24 hours.
It was reported earlier Ukraine said that militants twice fired anti-tank guided missiles against a Ukrainian checkpoint, where engineering works were under way at that time, near the village of Troitske at 12:25 p.m. on Oct. 5. One of the missiles hit an excavator, injuring four Ukrainian servicemen.
The Ukrainian side immediately informed representatives of the OSCE and the Joint Center for Control and Coordination about the shelling. A group of international monitors promptly arrived at the site and documented the incident.
