Ukraine Day 904: LIVE UPDATES BELOW.
Yesterday’s live coverage of the Ukraine conflict can be found here.
- READ OUR SPECIAL REPORT:
An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine
One Ukrainian soldier was killed and five wounded yesterday.
Colonel Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, military spokesman for the Presidential Administration, told reporters today that all of the casualties were incurred in the Mariupol area.
Motuzyanyk said that the heaviest fighting yesterday was seen in Shirokino, a seaside village just east of Mariupol, where he claims that Russian-backed forces conducted 16 attacks, nine of them with heavy weaponry.
Ivan Chmil, military press officer for the Mariupol sector, told the 112 television channel that Russian-backed forces had fired 116 122-mm shells from self-propelled artillery on Ukrainian marines’ positions in Shirokino in less than half an hour.
Over the course of the day, Chmil claimed that 96 120-mm mortar shells fell on the village.
Chmil also reported that mortars had been used to attack positions near the neighboring villages of Vodyanoye and Gnutovo.
Meanwhile the pro-separatist Donetsk News Agency (DAN) reports that a civilian was wounded by Ukrainian fire in Kominternovo.
DAN was told by “sources in the security agencies of the [self-declared] Donetsk People’s Republic” that a man, born in 1987, was wounded when Ukrainian troops shelled the village, damaging three houses.
Across the whole front line, Kiev reports 47 attacks by Russian-backed forces yesterday.
According to this morning’s ATO Press Center report, Ukrainian positions to the west and north of Donetsk, near Krasnogorovka, Avdeyevka, Troitskoye and Verkhnetoretskoye, were shelled with mortars.
Novosti Donbassa reports, citing the head of the municipal administration, that one civilian was wounded by shelling in Maryinka, west of Donetsk.
On the highway between Bakhmut (formerly Artyomovsk) and separatist-held Debaltsevo, Ukrainian positions near Luganskoye were reportedly shelled with 152 mm artillery.
In the Lugansk region, the military reports mortar, grenade-launcher and machine-gun attacks near Novozvanovka, Novoaleksandrovka and Novotoshkovskoye. Grenade launchers and small arms were also used near Zolotoye.
— Pierre Vaux