Ukraine Day 1085: 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
Six Ukrainian servicemen were wounded yesterday.
Colonel Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, spokesman for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told reporters today that six soldiers had been injured as a result of enemy fire.
He did not specify where the casualties were incurred.
According to this morning’s report from the Ukrainian military, Russia-backed forces conducted 94 attacks across the front line yesterday.
To the north of Donetsk, the epicentre of fighting since the morning of January 29, the military claims that Russia-backed forces used 120 and 82-mm mortars, tanks and grenade launchers in attacks on positions near Avdeyevka, Peski, Opytnoye and Kamenka, as well as Zaytsevo, Novgorodskoye, Zheleznoye and Luganskoye, near Gorlovka.
To the west of Donetsk, the Ukrainian-controlled suburbs of Krasnogorovka and Maryinka reportedly came under mortar and grenade-launcher fire.
Oleg Livanchuk, head of the military-civil administration in Krasnogorovka, posted photos of the aftermath of last night’s shelling on Facebook today:
Military press officer Volodymyr Lazareva told the 112 news channel this morning that the situation in Avdeyevka had improved somewhat in comparison with last week, and that residents were “already settling back into civilian life a little.”
Last night Svyatoslav Tsegolko, President Petro Poroshenko’s press secretary, reported that heating in Avdeyevka, down for most of the last week, leaving residents to face freezing conditions, had now been restored and street lights were back online.
By the early afternoon, however, Alexander Hug, deputy chief of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, reported that fighting had resumed as engineers attempted to conduct repairs on the Donetsk water filtering station on the edge of Avdeyevka:
There are reports on social media this afternoon of further shelling:
Translation: #Donetsk 14:29 Kiev time – loud outbound fire went from the orcs [slang for separatists] to the north.
Translation: Battle has broken out with the use of small arms, heavy-calibre machine guns, automatic grenade launchers and mortars. Very high intensity. #Avdeyevka
In the south, the Ukrainian military reports that Russia-backed forces yesterday used 152 and 122-mm artillery to shell the villages of Berdyanskoye, Lebedinskoye and Talakovka, just outside Mariupol, while mortar rounds fell on positions near Pavlopol, Vodyanoye, Shikino and Gnutovo.
There were also reports on social media last night of the use of Grad rockets in this area:
Translation: Fell near Talakovka by the river. Wide of everything.
Reports from VKontakte:
Translation: #Sartana “Grads again…”
There went another one…
Look Grads again (
Grads
Another Grad went… where?
These unconfirmed videos purportedly capture the sound of Grads, first from Sartana:
And then from the Vostochniy neighborhood on the eastern edge of Mariupol city. After several booms from artillery, what sounds like a salvo of Grads can be heard at around 2:48 into the video:
Finally, in the Lugansk region, the military reports that positions near Katerinovka, Popasnaya and Novozvanovka were all shelled with mortars, while grenade launchers and small arms were used in attacks near Krymskoye, Novoaleksandrovka and Troitskoye.
Meanwhile, Eduard Basurin, military spokesman for the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), has claimed this afternoon that two Russia-backed fighters had been killed by Ukrainian fire within the last 24 hours.
— Pierre Vaux