On January 25, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Zerkal said that Ukraine demanded the right to vote on all the negotiations tbetween he US and Russia on Donbass.
On January 27, occurred the first telephone conversation between the Presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States, where it was decided to begin preparations for a personal meeting of the Presidents.
Despite the fact that the Ukrainian issue was most likely discussed during the conversation, Kiev, as subsequent events showed, was not even informed of the results.
To find out their perspectives at the upcoming negotiations between the Russian Federation and the United States, Kiev chose the only understandable and familiar for it way, namely the escalation of violence in the guise of an innocent victim.
On the night of January 30, 2017, the Ukrainian side opened fire with heavy weapons along the entire front line and tried to break through the defense of the DPR army between Yasinovataya (under the DPR control) and Avdeevka (under the AFU control).
The attack of the Ukrainian military was repelled, while the shelling by the Ukrainian side got, for the first time in many months, a very tough response.
Kiev concluded that the upcoming negotiations between the Russian Federation and the United States promised it nothing good, but decided to take advantage of the drastic response of the Republics and return the West’s lost attention.
On the morning of January 30, the Ukrainian side asked for the «regime of silence» in order to allegedly repair damaged power lines in Avdeevka controlled by them.
After receiving confirmation of the cease-fire from the DPR, Kiev immediately began the severe shelling of the front-line localities of the Republic.
In the south of the DPR, the bombardment lasted for over 10 hours, resulting in several villages completely de-energized in the 20-degree frost.
Multiple damage to residential buildings was recorded in Donetsk.
In Makeevka, a satellite town of Donetsk, as a result of the shelling, there was killed a woman and three civilians were wounded. The fire also hit a hospital and a school, with the children brought in time to the cellar.
Simultaneously with the shelling of the localities, Kiev launched another attack on the positions of the DPR army. The attackers got into a minefield and, after suffering heavy losses, retreated.
According to the DPR Defense Ministry, only during a few morning hours, the Ukrainian side launched on the territory of the DPT over 200 artillery and mortar shells, after which the army of the Republic was forced to open return fire.
Kiev immediately declared the threat of a humanitarian disaster in Avdeevka which was left ‘by the shelling of the terrorists’ without light, heat, water and gas. At the same time, two of the four power lines feeding Avdeevka had been damaged as early as 2015, and for two years the Ukrainian military and civil administration had not been able to fix them.
Under this pretext, the President of Ukraine Poroshenko interrupted his visit to Germany, during which, judging by the lack of triumphant reports from Kiev, he had been unable to achieve anything but another reminder from the authorities of the country to fulfill Minsk Agreements in full.
Kiev announced the beginning of the emergency evacuation of Avdeevka residents, for which 80 buses were provided for the locality, currently accounting over 10,000 people of the population. At the same time, during the Ukrainian media interviews with the local people, it was found that most of them were not going to go anywhere.
The President Poroshenko held an urgent meeting with the power ministries, at which he ordered to immediately convene a meeting of the UN Security Council and the Contact Group in Minsk, and also said that the shelling of residential areas with «Grads» and artillery could not be followed by negotiations on a possible lifting or easing of sanctions against Russia.
It looks like that it was for the sake of this statement that Kiev had begun a new round of the escalation in Donbass, which has brought death and the massive destruction to its inhabitants, and cost Ukraine, according to the official data of the ATO headquarters, 300 dead and wounded soldiers.
Moreover, another attempt of Kiev to fan «Russian aggression» hysteria has not brought it the desired results. The UN Security Council agreed on an immediate ceasefire, the State Department and the US Embassy in Kiev expressed another concern, and at the meeting of the Contact Group in Minsk, the Ukrainian side was offered to follow Steinmeier’s formula, which it promptly refused.
At the same time, the German edition Süddeutsche Zeitung stated, citing its sources in the government, that ‘Berlin is following, with increasing concern, the deterioration of the situation in the east of Ukraine, because they understand that the blame for what is happening lies, in many ways, with Kiev’, and The New York Times published an article titled «The civil war in the Ukraine», from which, however, the word «civil» was later deleted.
However, Kiev has not stopped shelling the Republics of Donbass. According to residents of Donetsk, they had not had to survive attacks of such intensity since the winter of 2015, during the battle for Debaltsevo, when the Ukrainian side was hitting Donetsk with massive diversionary attacks.
According to the DPR Defense Ministry, on January 31, the Ukrainian military made six attempts to break through the defense of the army of the Republic and opened fire on its territory over 3,000 times, including nearly 500 rounds from MLRS. The heaviest blows were dealt on the DPR army position in the Yasinovataya area, Donetsk and Makeevka.
During the day, there were killed two women in Donetsk and Makeevka, and another five civilians were wounded.
In Donetsk, the residents did not have enough time to restore their home. Only on the northern outskirts of Donetsk, there were damaged over 10 houses, and in multi-storey buildings in previously safe areas, windows were broken up to 8th and 9th floors.
In one of such houses, a shell flew into an apartment, where early in the morning, a two-year-old child was sleeping. Miraculously, he and his parents were not injured, but the apartment is totally destroyed.
In Donetsk, journalists came under fire, with one of them shrapnel wounded in a leg, as well as an ambulance, with the driver and two passengers wounded.
In Makeyevka, in addition to numerous destructions of houses, a city hospital and a secondary school were hit by the Ukrainian shelling.
In the evening of January 31, on the outskirts of Makeevka landed the tail of a missile launched from an anti-aircraft missile complex «Buk» situated presumably in Kiev-controlled Avdeevka. Such a missile had admittedly downed the Malaysian MH-17 in 2014. at the time, Ukraine had stated that it had no such missiles.
The DPR authorities also noted targeted strikes by the Ukrainian side on vital infrastructure.
On January 31, only in Donetsk two boilers were damaged, and another in the Gorlovka area.
In the south of the Republic power lines were damaged again, which resulted in six localities left without power. In one of them, a gas pipeline was also damaged.
In the Donetsk area, there were also de-energized two major filter plants, which resulted in almost all of the capital of the DPR, a city with the population of a million people, remained without water for 24 hours.
The staff of one of the stations reported the presence of chlorine smell in the air. It is possible that there was damaged the chlorine storage, the destruction of which threatens an ecological catastrophe comparable in its effects with the use of chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, Kiev is fanning hysteria about the deterioration of the situation in Donbass.
In the center of the capital of Ukraine, seven coffins with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed near Avdeevka (out of 300 officially recognized by the Ukrainian authorities) were brought to Maidan, which a demonstration parting with them was staged, with anti-Russian slogans and calling for revenge.
All over the the city, nationalists are picketing buildings of the Russian banks, spraying red paint on their doors.
All over Ukraine are opened points of fundraising for Avdeevka residents, ‘the victims of the Russian aggression’.
In the Odessa region, unidentified persons burned a church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.
The DPR intelligence reported that only over the past day, Kiev delivered to Donbass two missile-tactical complexes «Tochka-U», two MLRS «Grad», up to 40 armored vehicles, including six tanks that arrived accompanied by the OSCE vehicle, as well as up to 250 soldiers of a Polish PMC. The armored vehicles are advancing to the front line in the Avdeevka area.
On February 1, the National Security and Defense Council Secretary, Turchinov arrived in Avdeevka, where he gave the order to repel the ‘terrorists’ attack’ and prepare for a counter-offensive.
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