As many as 14,698 ceasefire violations have been recorded in the Donbas war zone by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (OSCE SMM), over the last week, the mission’s deputy chief Alexander Hug reported on March 17 during a press conference in Kyiv.
“That is the number of times the lives and the livelihoods of Ukrainians on both sides of the conflict were endangered in that week,” Hug said.
The mission’s official said both Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed militants kept disregarding their cease-fire commitments and engaged firearms, mortars, artillery and armored vehicles all along the separation line, including her residential areas.
However, the present week has been calmer than the previous one: The number of cease-fire regime violations has decreased by 15 percent, and intensity of fire from heavy weapons banned under the Minsk agreements decreased by 60 percent. Over the past days, the OSCE monitors have heard 911 explosions caused by various weapons, comparing to the 2,238 strikes last week.
Nevertheless, both sides continue ignoring the troops and weapons withdrawal off the contact line beyond the security zone constituted by the Minsk accord, the OSCE official told.
In particular, on March 10, the OSCE monitors spotted three 2S3 Akatsiya self-propelled artillery units at the Kremlin-controlled village of Khreschatytske near Novoazovsk, a city of 11,700 people nearly 850 kilometers southeast of Kyiv on the southeastern tip of Ukraine.
Deployed nine kilometers away from the contact line, those weapons should be pulled off at least 25 kilometers away, Hug said. The same way, the OSCE drone recorded a 2A36 Giatsint-B artillery howitzer near the Ukrainian-controlled village of Vyskryva on March 14, inside the security zone demilitarized by troops withdrawal agreements.
“Many of the weapons we observed were positioned in or around residential areas, and the outgoing fire is unavoidably met by incoming fire, and the civilians are caught in the middle,” Hug noted. “Last week we in fact confirmed eight incidents of civilians injured in shelling on the both sides of the contact line.”
Besides, the OSCE monitors are still facing continuing restrictions and incidents of intimidation by both sides of the conflict. Over the past week, the mission has been denied access to the observed frontline zone 73 times.
