The week from 1 to 7 January is special for Slavs. At night from December 31 to January 1st, they celebrate the New Year - with friends, fireworks and unrestrained joy. On January 7th, they celebrate Christmas - in the family, peace and spiritual conversations. At this time, quarrels, resentments and any disagreements always go on the back burner.
However, the first week of 2017 brought Donbas neither peace not calm. Before Christmas, the President of Ukraine called residents of Donbass ‘Antichrist’, against whom the ‘valiant ATO warriors’ are fighting, which the latter did all the past week, despite another cease-fire.
According to the DPR Defense Ministry, over the festive week, the Ukrainian military over 3,000 times opened fire on 15 localities of the Republic. As a result of the shelling, there were damaged or destroyed 10 houses and power lines, with two villages in the south of the Republic consequently left without light and heat.
Kiev also intensified the provocative shelling of the Donetsk filtration plant, the damage of which may result in a considerable part of the inhabitants of the DPR, as well as residents of three Ukraine-controlled localities in the Donetsk region, left without water. At the same time, last year Kiev handed the Joint Center for Coordination and Control over the ceasefire (JCCC) a written confirmation of guarantees that the fire would not be opened on the plant and the area within 1.5 km of it, and that in this area would not be placed any Ukrainian army units.
The number of daily attacks ranged from 200 to 500, and in the middle of the week, on the eve of the arrival in Donbass of the Foreign Minister of Austria and the future OSCE Chairman, Sebastian Kurtz, occurred its sharp increase to over 1,000 bombardments. It is possible that in such a way, Kiev provoked the DPR army to open return fire, in order to demonstrate it to the future head of the OSCE as the DPR typical aggression.
Around the same time, Ukraine's defense minister announced the amassing of 300 MLRS and 600 tanks on the side of the Republics, supporting a recent statements by the US Senator John McCain about the need to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons.
At the same time, Kiev continued to deliver to Donbass heavy equipment and weapons. According to the DPR intelligence, last week in the Donetsk segment of the front arrived a battery of MLRS «Grad», a platoon of MLRS «Uragan», 5 artillery batteries, over 5 tank platoons and 2 companies of infantry fighting vehicles. On the Svetlodarsk arc, where the previous week the Ukrainian army had made an unsuccessful attempt to attack, arrived 2 snipers companies of 200 men.
In addition, at the end of the past week, in the Donetsk segment of the front arrived a train of 20 carriages with ammunition.
In the Lugansk segment of the front, the LPR intelligence discovered three clusters of the Ukrainian equipment, including tanks, motorized artillery systems and heavy artillery. In Novoluganskoe, a locality seized by the Ukrainian military in the «gray» zone, positions were equipped to accommodate heavy weapons, with Kiev also delivering the personnel, tanks and artillery there.
In the Lugansk area also increases the number of foreign mercenaries fighting for Ukraine. According to the LPR intelligence sources in the Ukrainian army, early in the week, to the north of the capital of the LPR arrived a unit of 20 mercenaries used exclusively for provocation purposes. At the end of the week, in the same area arrived a group of foreign instructors on sabotage and subversion, who, according to an anonymous source, had trained ISIS terrorists in Syria.
The Ukrainian army suffered, during the celebration of the New Year and Christmas, new non-combat losses.
Due to the ban by the ATO command for sale and consumption of alcohol in the units, the Ukrainian military started to drink alcohol-containing technical fluids. As a result, on the first day of 2017, eight Ukrainian soldiers were taken to hospital with severe poisoning. According to hospital medical staff, five of them could not have been saved, the other three became blind and still are in serious condition.
Another three soldiers got poisoned by carbon monoxide, and one was killed while hitting an automatic gun butt on the floor to reload it, during their «party».
Local residents reported that in a locality in the south of Donetsk, the Ukrainian military staged fireworks of small arms, resulting in two of them killed and another two wounded.
This information is confirmed by the statement of the Chief of the Ukrainian army Staff that non-combat losses among Ukrainian soldiers had, for the first time, exceeded the combat losses (256 to 211 men). At the same time, he clarified that 18 men were killed and 11 hospitalized due to drinking fluids and careless handling of weapons. Also according to the Ukrainian authorities, 11 military are wanted as deserters.
However, the Ukrainian official data on the number of deserters are questionable. According to the DPR intelligence sources in the Ukrainian army, at the end of the past week, soldiers of a unit newly arrived by rotation, hit their own mines as the command of the unit which they had replaced, had not transferred maps of minefields to them.
As a result of the explosion, two soldiers were killed and one seriously wounded. The commander of the unit presented the killed in his report as deserters. In total, 240 men are listed in this unit as deserters.
At the same time, the Ukrainian command prevents, in every way, right down to threats to the families, the dismissal of officers and soldiers who refuse to renew their military contract. To units with the «lowest morale», Kiev sends radicals of the nationalist battalions. In the mid-week, as a result of the military’s refusal to carry out combat tasks, in the Donetsk area arrived up to 40 radicals of the «Right Sector».
It looks like the Ukrainian military have turned into an army of «slaves», with the nationalists as overseers in it. At the same time, Kiev finds it increasingly difficult to hide punitive functions and the Nazi ideology of the volunteer battalions, shown recently on the Channel 1 in Germany in a video report about the Ukrainian nationalists in the Ukrainian army.
The Ukrainian military’s drunkenness and the terror imposed by the Ukrainian nationalists lead to serious consequences for the civilian population on the Kiev-controlled territory.
According to the local authorities, over the past week, the Ukrainian military committed 12 accidents in Donbass. In one of them a woman was killed, in another two local residents were taken to hospital in serious condition.
The DPR intelligence reported that late in the week, the Ukrainian security services had taken hostage 20 civilians and brought them, in handcuffs and escorted by 25 «Hammers» with the the SBU employees, to the front line in the south-west of Donetsk. The DPR authorities appealed to international legal organizations with a request to prevent a possible provocation with massive civilian casualties.
At the same time, according to local residents, in the Ukraine-controlled part of the Donetsk region arrived about 300 employees of the SBU for mass cleansing of the local population.
On the same day, it became known that the Ukrainian authorities had arrested three residents of the frontal locality near Donetsk, for «terrorism». Two of them are charged with the fact that in 2014, for a few days, they had stood, completely unarmed, at checkpoints of insurgent Donbass.
Early last week, the Deputy Minister on the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons and former governor of the Lugansk region, Georgy Tuka expressed full confidence in the fact that within a year and a half, Donbass would be forced to return to Ukraine.
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