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Despite the general perception of the media that significant diplomatic progress is being made in Ukraine, ceasefire violations are still being reported. According to Ukraine, four soldiers were wounded over the previous 24 hours. Reuters reports:
“Today illegal armed groups, cynically ignoring the peace agreements, violated the ceasefire … The fighters carried out an attack with an anti-tank missile,” the Ukrainian military said in a Facebook post.
The attack undermines earlier comments by Poroshenko, who said the recent lull in fighting heralded a new phase in Ukraine’s efforts to quell the separatist uprising.
“We managed to pause the hot phase of the conflict. The main thing is that we managed to cease hostilities … It is not just a ceasefire already. It is a real truce,” he said in a speech to a military academy in Kiev.
Before the claims from the Ukrainian military, however, there had been no overnight attacks. The Ukraine Crisis Media Center adds details from today’s briefing of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council (NSDC):
The latest OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) report is dated October 6 at 19:30 local time. The OSCE has verified that a tank withdrawal in underway:
In government-controlled areas of Luhansk region the SMM monitored the withdrawal of 15 main battle tanks (MBTs, seven T-72 and eight T-64) to storage sites, in accordance with the Addendum. Ukrainian Armed Forces notified the SMM that the withdrawal of tanks had been completed. The SMM visited three storage sites belonging to Ukrainian Armed Forces and two belonging to “Lugansk People’s Republic” (“LPR”), and verified that all tanks declared as withdrawn were present.
However, several sections of the report deal with violations of the ceasefire agreement. Note that extremely large amount of armor present in territory controlled by Russian-backed fighters:
The SMM UAV spotted, in violation of the respective withdrawal lines, three MBTs and one self-propelled howitzer in the area of “DPR”-controlled Bezimenne (30km east of Mariupol). The SMM UAV also observed beyond the respective withdrawal lines 59 MTBs, five self-propelled howitzers, and other military equipment in the area of “DPR”-controlled Torez (60km east of Donetsk).
The next part of the report we’ll highlight is the investigation into the possible downing of a Ukrainian military drone over Donetsk:
In Donetsk city, the SMM heard on 5 October four loud explosions assessed to be artillery or mortar fire. On the following day the SMM followed up on reports that the explosions were anti-aircraft fire that shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which consequently crashed in a residential area. At the alleged UAV crash site the SMM observed that the roof and the living room of the affected house were damaged. The SMM also noted what looked like a fragment of an unidentified missile, which was shortly after collected by “DPR” members at the site. The owner of the house (female, early sixties) stated that following the four explosions she had heard and saw several pieces of metal falling from the sky. According to the interlocutor the “DPR” members had also collected these fragments.
On the night of October 5, video surfaced which reportedly showed a separatist surface-to-air missile shooting a drone out of the sky: