Kiev forces violate truce deal 29 times in single day: DPR

"There were 29 violations [of the ceasefire] in a day [on Saturday],” Interfax news agency quoted the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) as saying on Sunday.
 
It added that the pro-Russians counted two rounds of tank fire, 17 rounds of mortar fire, five rounds of infantry vehicle fire and four rounds of small-arms fire against their positions by the Ukrainian army forces.
 
DPR authorities also said that Zhabicheve, Kalynivka, Mykolaivka, Shyrokyne, Spartak and Horlivka communities as well as the Oktyabrskaya coalmine and the vicinity of Donetsk airport were targeted in the Ukrainian forces' attacks.
 
On Friday, a senior United Nations official briefed the Security Council about the repeated violations of the Minsk agreement and the concomitant human costs.
 
“The continued non-implementation of various provisions of the agreement entails dangerous limbo.” said UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman in his report to the 15-member Council.
 
“We are either looking at a return to a deepening, intractable conflict or a momentary upsurge in parts of the conflict,” he said, adding, “We cannot afford either scenario.”
 
Feltman also expressed concerns that since the signing of the Minsk package in February, 400 more deaths have been registered, bringing the death toll to over 6,400 people in eastern Ukraine.
 
Meanwhile, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin highlighted Kiev’s “flagrant violation and blunt ignorance of the Minsk agreements” during the Security Council meeting on Friday, calling on the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) of the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) stationed in eastern Ukraine to identify the violators of the truce in the region.
 
“We call on the SMM OSCE to not only discreetly establish the ceasefire violations, but in addition to that to precisely report on the targets of the shelling and its victims...,” he said.
 
Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying in an interview on Saturday that the Ukrainian conflict was deliberately fabricated by “unprofessional actions” of Kiev’s Western sponsors.
 
"I believe that this (Ukraine) crisis was created deliberately and it is the result of our partner’s unprofessional actions," Putin said in a Saturday interview with Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
 
The remarks by the Russian president came amid counter-allegations by the West that the Kremlin has been meddling in Ukraine’s domestic affairs and backing fighters in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, where Kiev initiated a military operation in April 2014 against pro-Russia forces.
 
The Ukrainian crisis began in 2014 when pro- European Union (EU) forces, including Western-backed radical nationalists, ousted then Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, after he refused to sign an Association Agreement with the EU.