The main event of the past week was several attempts to separate the forces and means of the sides of the conflict at three sites of the front in Donbass.
On the day appointed at the Minsk negotiations, October 1st, the withdrawal of troops occurred at only one site, in the LPR.
The second attempt to separate the forces and means of the sides of the conflict took place on October 3. In the DPR, the Ukrainian side opened fire on the territory of the Republic from the position from which the Ukrainian troops were to have been withdrawn, and immediately accused the DPR army of violating the ceasefire.
At the same time, the OSCE observers, present at the site, had to call the Ukrainian commanders demanding to stop fire, after which their patrol came under fire from Ukrainian position during the withdrawal of the DPR army units.
At the second site of the withdrawal, in the LPR, Kiev refused to do it without any explanation.
On October 7, the separation of the conflicting parties turned out to be possible at the site in the DPR. In Stanitsa Luganskaya, a suburb of the capital of the LPR, the Ukrainian side refused to withdraw its troops until, according to the Kiev representative at the Minsk negotiations and the former President of Ukraine, Kuchma, a complete withdrawal of the DPR army troops and a stable «silence regime» on the Donetsk front.
Yesterday, on October 9, Kiev once again, for the fourth time, refused to withdraw its units from the Stanitsa Luganskaya. The representative of Ukraine in the Joint Center of Coordination and Control for the ceasefire (JCCC) said that he had not received the order.
At the same time, the LPR intelligence found that, on the contrary, in this region the Ukrainian military were reinforcing their position. The Ukrainian engineering units were carrying out measurements of the terrain in order to establish the reference points for shooting from long-range artillery.
The DPR intelligence reported that in the Donetsk segment of the front, where the separation of the forces and means had finally taken place, on the eve the Ukrainian side had mined the entire demilitarized area.
At the end of the week, the OSCE observers reported that in the Lugansk segment of the front, in particular, in the area of Stanitsa Luganskaya, the Ukrainian military did not allow them, without any explanation, on their positions.
Nationalist units of the Ukrainian army, located in this area, announced that in the case of receiving the order to move to the rear, they would not obey it and would start a guerrilla war against the army of the LPR.
At the same time, together with the failure to fulfill the agreements reached at the negotiations in Minsk, Kiev significantly increased the intensity of the shelling of the territory of the Republics. In the middle of the week, the military authorities of the both DPR and LPR reported a sharp aggravation of the situation on the front.
In the DPR, the number of daily attacks reached several hundreds, and most of them were carried out by the Ukrainian military purposely on residential areas and infrastructure of localities of the Republic, and with weapons prohibited by the Minsk Agreements, including tanks and 122 and 152mm artillery.
In just a week, according to the DPR Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian side opened fire on the territory of the Republic 1.352 times, including 803 bombardments with tanks, heavy artillery and mortars. The fire was opened along the entire contact line, from Gorlovka in the north to Dokuchaevsk and Sakhanka in the south.
As a result of the Ukrainian attacks on the positions of the DPR army, 6 soldiers were killed and another four wounded, including one killed and one wounded in the explosion of a landmine set, by a Ukrainian subversive group, on the route of a tanker in Makeevka, the satellite town of Donetsk. The fuel in the tanker caught fire, and the explosion was so powerful that there were damaged dozens of nearby houses, 10 schools, three kindergartens and a hospital.
In addition, the expanding shrapnel damaged a power substation, which led to the de-energizing of a nearby mine, with 126 miners still underground, whom the DPR authorities managed to raise to the surface only the next morning.
Another two DPR soldiers were killed and one more captured during an attempt of a Ukrainian subversive group to break through in the southern segment of the Donetsk front. The attempt was made under the cover of artillery fire from the Ukrainian positions, and before retreating the saboteurs mined the dead bodies of the DPR soldiers.
Curiously enough, the day before, according to the DPR military authorities, the OSCE representatives had refused to come to this area and document the consequences of the shelling that had been taking place place there all the week. The next day they also refused to come and do their work on the northern outskirts of Gorlovka, as reported by the mayor of the city.
Over the past week, the Ukrainian side shelled 31 localities of the DPR. According to the local authorities, the shelling resulted in two gas pipelines and 27 homes damaged, 16 of which were completely or partially destroyed.
Moreover, last week, for the first time since another ceasefire announced on September 1st, civilians were wounded: two women born in 1949 and 1960, as well as a a man who suffered a concussion and numerous shrapnel injuries as a result of a mortar shell directly hitting his home.
In the LPR, over the past week, there was killed one soldier of the army of the Republic and another three were wounded. In addition, as a result of the shelling of the town of Stakhanov with the Ukrainian 152mm artillery, there were partially destroyed three residential houses, but the Republic managed to avoid civilian casualties.
Having dramatically increased the intensity of the shelling, Kiev still continues to deliver weapons and equipment to the front line in Donbass. In the last week, the DPR intelligence reported the arrival at the Ukrainian position of two tank companies, three mechanized infantry companies, three 122mm artillery batteries, one 122mm MLRS «Grad» division, three 120mm mortar batteries, as well as two fuel tankers and two train cars with ammunition.
In the Lugansk segment of the front, according to the intelligence of the Republic, Kiev delivered nine tanks, two infantry fighting vehicles, three 220mm MLRS «Uragan» and nine trucks with ammunition.
In addition, in the Donetsk segment of the front, the intelligence of the Republic detected positions of snipers who had come to Ukraine from the United States, while in the LPR, yesterday, there was intercepted and forced to land a UAV RQ-11B Raven produced in the United States. According to the military authorities of the Republic, a party of such drones had been recently delivered from the US to Ukraine and then sent to the ATO area.
Moreover, a source of the DPR intelligence in the ATO headquarters reported that, in the middle of the week, the military attache at the US Embassy in Ukraine, Colonel Paul Schmidt, had arrived in Mariupol, the Kiev-controlled largest city in the south of Donbass. Presumably, the purpose of his inspection was to assess the ability of the Ukrainian command to repel the offensive of the DPR army under the conditions of the demobilization that started in the Ukrainian army.
It looks like the assessment of the US attache turned out to be low, since the demobilization in the Ukrainian army has been delayed. The Ukrainian military are being held in the ATO area by delays in the payment of their allowance.
On October 6, 2016, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Klimkin was interviewed by the German television channel «Deutsche Welle». During the interview he bluntly stated that Ukraine ‘is not going to move forward with the implementation of the Minsk Agreements’, and that ‘the Minsk-2 does not exist’.
On October 8, 2016, the command of the DPR army stated announced that, due to systematic violations of all the agreements by Ukraine, it is ‘forced to revise plans for combat training of the army units, focusing on the offensive’.
The LPR is also preparing to hold large-scale exercises on the counter attack.
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