Representatives of the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) and OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) have recorded the damage caused by artillery shelling of a neighbourhood in Irmino outside Stakhanov town.
LPR People’s Militia said the 2nd floor of a residential house in Sovkhoznaya Street was destroyed in 8 October shelling and that other two houses in the same street sustained shrapnel damage.
JCCC representatives jointly with OSCE observers recorded damage, determined the direction of fire and talked to local residents.
“Bombings began from 4 p.m. yesterday and then stopped for some time,” owner of the ruined house at 101A Sovkhoznaya Street Anna Kononenko said.
“I remembered hearing an instruction on the radio on what to do in case of a shelling; we have windows all over the place, and I said let’s take cover,” she said. “Then there was a clap, we didn’t even hear an explosion, and everything began to crack, the house toppled and we never knew how it all happened.”
“The burst wave knocked out the doors, it was cracking and blasting. We stayed alive because we were on the ground floor,” she added.
She said Irmino, located closer to the frontline than Stakhanov, was targeted more often.
“Shooting occurs very often, not a day goes by without shooting,” Kononenko complained.
“We know well where they shoot from, and we even know the weapons they use, firing routinely from Popasnaya direction,” she said.
Pensioner Nadezhda Fedotova, resident of another damaged house, noted that the shelling continued the whole evening till night.
“I was sitting on a wooden crate in the yard at around 10 p.m. yesterday listening to where the fire was coming from and where the shells were landing. Then I stood up and walked away and a shell landed right on the place where I had been sitting,” Fedotova said.
“Our windows and doors were smashed; it’s a miracle we weren’t killed,” she added.
Earlier, LPR Defence Ministry spokesman Andrey Marochko said Kiev forces had intensified the shelling of LPR settlements and People’s Militia positions in a show of loyalty to chief of the Ukrainian army General Staff Viktor Muzhenko who had arrived in the zone of so-called “anti-terrorist operation”.
The members of the Contact Group on the implementation of the peace plan in the East of Ukraine at a meeting in Minsk on August, 26th agreed on complete ceasefire in Donbass effective from midnight April, 30. Since the autumn of 2014 it is the 9th attempt to set up a durable 'silence regime'. Вut due to systematic ceasefire violations by Ukrainian forces, that shelled the Republics territories with artillery, mortars and tanks that were to be withdrawn in accordance with the Minsk agreements, LPR and DPR urged a strict implementation of comprehensive ceasefire effective from September, 15. Kiev promised to observe the truce, though LPR People's Militia records violations by Kiev forces almost daily.
The Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements was adopted by the Contact Group on Ukraine on February 12, 2015 and supported by member states of the "Normandy Four" (Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France). The UN Security Council approved the document by its 2202 Resolution and called upon all the sides to ensure full implementation of the Package of Measures.
The document provides for comprehensive ceasefire, withdrawal of all heavy weapons from the contact line, starting a dialog on reconstruction of social and economic ties between Kiev and Donbass. It also envisages carrying out constitutional reform in Ukraine providing for decentralization and adopting permanent legislation on a special status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
