A cease-fire in the war-stricken city of Avdiyivka in Donetsk Oblast was shattered on Feb. 1 after just three-and-half hours, the head of Donetsk Oblast’s military and civil administration, Pavlo Zhebrivskiy, said in a post on Facebook on Feb. 1.
He said Russian-backed forces had opened fire with artillery on a team of electricians that had been attempting to repair damaged power lines.
Zhebrivskiy’s report came just a few hours after the Joint Center for Coordination and Control, a liaison group made up of Ukrainian and Russian military officers overseeing the Minsk II cease-fire agreement, said it had been given written confirmation by the Russian side that a local ceasefire would take effect from noon on Feb. 1.
Avdiyivka, a Donetsk Oblast city some 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, came under fire on Jan. 29 by heavy artillery, including Grad rockets, after Russian-backed forces attempted to push the Ukrainian army away from defensive positions on a key highway next to the city.
Meanwhile, many residents of Avdiyivka have been left without water, heating, or electricity. The emergency services on Jan. 31 also said they were preparing to carry out a mass evacuation of the city’s residents, but on Feb. 1 it was reported that only 77 had left overnight.
Also on Feb. 1, Donetsk Oblast Police Chief Vyacheslav Abroskin reported the death of a woman in a shelling attack.
According to Zhebrivskiy, the team of electricians had come within 300 meters of the area of damaged power lines before coming under fire. The area had first had to be cleared of unexploded ordnance, he said.
Power to the city was cut when heavy fighting in the industrial zone and old part of the city caused damage to power lines. Shelling also damaged the giant coking plant on the north-western edge of the city, causing it to suspend operations. That, in turn, disrupted heat supplies to housing in the city, as the plant’s furnaces are also used to provide the city’s centralized heat supply.
Minister for Regional Development Hennadiy Zubko said at a cabinet meeting on Feb. 1 that the temperature in the city’s apartments had since dropped to 12-15 degrees Celsius. Temperatures outside are now -11 degrees Celsius.
The city’s hospital and retirement home have their own electricity generators, and tap water is now available to citizens twice a day, Zubko said. A drinking-water delivery service is also operating.
Most of the 77 residents of the city evacuated overnight were patients from the hospital and retirees. Another 175 citizens, mostly children, will be transported to the city Svyatohirsk on Feb. 1, the Emergency Situations Service said.
The service on Jan. 31 said it had prepared a fleet of 80 buses and two electric trains to evacuate 12,000 people from Avdiyivka, a city with a current population of 22,000. About 35,000 people lived there before the start of the war in mid-April 2014.
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk contributed to this story.
