Ukraine Day 1016: LIVE UPDATES BELOW.
Yesterday’s live coverage of the Ukraine conflict can be found here.
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An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine
Another five Ukrainian soldiers were wounded yesterday in the Donbass.
According to the deputy governor of the Lugansk region, Yuriy Klimenko, four of these casualties were incurred near the village of Krymskoye – a vulnerable pocket of Ukrainian territory on the southern banks of the Seversky Donets river.
Klimenko claimed that Russia-backed forces had attacked Ukrainian positions near the village with 120-mm and 82-mm mortars, as well as grenade launchers, anti-aircraft artillery and machine guns.
The Lugansk administration also reported attacks near Novozvanovka and Popasnaya, in the west of the region, and Stanitsa Luganskaya, northeast of the separatist-held regional capital.
Across the whole of the front line, the Ukrainian military reported 38 attacks yesterday.
The heaviest fighting was seen once again to the south and west of Donetsk.
Military press officer Aleksandr Kindsfater told Mariupol news site 0629.com.ua that there had been 22 attacks in this sector yesterday.
Kindsfater said that Krasnogorovka, west of Donetsk, had been shelled with 82-mm and 120-mm mortars, while 82-mm mortars were used to shell the village of Shirokino, east of Mariupol on the Azov coast. Shirokino alone came under fire seven times over the course of the day.
Foreign ministers of the so-called Normandy Quartet are meeting in Minsk today to discuss the Ukraine war.
The Ukrainian, Russian, German and French foreign ministers have begun their meeting within the last hour.
Hromadske TV reports that Ukraine’s Pavlo Klimkin will demand the release of 57 captives held by the Russia-backed separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk.
Klimkin has also said that he is inviting his German and French colleagues, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Jean-Marc Ayrault, to visit a frontier-crossing checkpoint on the front line near the Lugansk town of Zolotoye, which has been closed to civilians since March this year due to shelling.
Several Crimean Tatar musicians were detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
15minut.org reported that they were detained this morning while returning to Russian-occupied Crimea from a concert in Kiev.
According to the report, the detainees include three members of the hip-hop group Qirim (Seyran Khalilov, Eskender Chatalov and Osman Dzhemlyadinov) as well as singer Reana Tarkova and Aysha Absaitova, the mother of another participant in the concert, and Aliye Degermendzhi, mother of political prisoner Mustafa Degermendzhi.
The Crimean Tatars were arrested by the FSB at the administrative border between mainland Ukraine and the occupied peninsula.
This afternoon, however, Eskender Bariiev, a member of the now-banned Crimean Tatar Mejlis, reported on Facebook that “all of the artists have been released.”
The OSCE has reported that they lost an unmanned aerial vehicle near Mariupol on Sunday.
According to the latest report from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM), the drone was lost near Pishchevik, on the front line northeast of Mariupol.
From the report:
On 27 November the SMM launched a mini unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) near government-controlled Pyshchevyk (25km north-east of Mariupol). Approximately 500m north-north-east of the launch point the operator received several warning messages after which the screen of the ground control station tablet used by the operator went black. The SMM travelled to the point where the UAV was last located and regained a signal from the UAV; the SMM, however, was unable to regain control over the UAV as it continued to fly toward the north-north-east, into an area possibly contaminated by UXO. The SMM lost all contact with the UAV. The SMM informed the JCCC.
