Ukraine Day 996: 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
A civilian has been killed and another wounded in the Donbass, along with three Ukrainian soldier, as Kiev reports 54 attacks yesterday.
According to the Donetsk police, a civilian man, born in 1986, was killed when a shell exploded outside his home in the government-controlled village of Novgorodskoye, west of separatist-held Gorlovka.
The Ukrainian military claims that the settlement was shelled, along with Zaytsevo, another village outside Gorlovka, with 82 and 120 mm mortars.
To the north of Gorlovka, another civilian man, aged 40, was admitted to hospital in Toretsk this morning. The police report that he was wounded when Russia-backed forces shelled the Toretsk area today.
A few kilometres northwest of Toretsk, the Ukrainian military reported that two cars had been torched after Russia-backed forces fired on a civilian frontier-crossing point near the village of Mayorsk with grenade launchers and machine guns last night.
Meanwhile in Kiev, Colonel Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the Defense Ministry, told reporters that two Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded near Donetsk, one of them in Avdeyevka, while a third had been injured in Vodyanoye, east of Mariupol.
Mortars were reportedly used in attacks on Avdeyevka, as well as Krasnogorovka and Maryinka, west of Donetsk.
The Donetsk police published photos today of the aftermath of the shelling in Maryinka:
In the south, the military reported mortar shelling of positions near Taramchuk, Novotroitskoye, Stepnoye and Beryozovoye – near the Donetsk-Mariupol highway, and Talakovka, Lebedinskoye, Shirokino and Pavlopol – nearer Mariupol.
On the other side of the conflict zone, in the Lugansk region, the Ukrainian military reported that 122 mm artillery had been used to shell positions near Kalinovo and Popasnaya, where we have also seen reports on social of fighting today:
Meanwhile the Russia-backed separatists in Donetsk reported today that one of their fighters had been wounded by Ukrainian fire within the last 24 hours.
Eduard Basurin, separatist military spokesman, claimed that Ukrainian forces had fired 665 rounds over that period.
— Pierre Vaux