Shelling Kills Several Civilians as Fighting Continues in Eastern Ukraine

Ukrainian officials say the country’s troops are acting with restraint but are ready to respond with full force if rebel attacks continue to increase; they also claim that thousands of Russian troops are in eastern Ukraine and just over the border inside Russia, and appear to be at a high state of combat readiness.

Regional police said at least one man and a young woman had been killed in Sartana.

The clashes, near the port of Mariupol in the southeast and at rebel-held Horlivka, further frayed an increasingly tenuous ceasefire as Ukraine prepared to mark its Independence Day next week.

Oleksandr Turchynov, the chief of the regime’s National Security and Defense Council, who was in the Donbass region this week, claimed that the Ukrainian military logged 153 attacks by the separatists overnight, representing “a black record” since a truce was sealed in February. Lavrov said the uptick in shelling could be the beginning of a new Ukrainian offensive.

“On one street there were five houses which were really badly damaged by shell fragments”. One residential home suffered a well-tended thriving garden by having grapes as well as a vegan patches.

The separatist website, DAN, said at least three people had been killed and four wounded as a result of government shelling of Horlivka, a regular front-line hot spot north of the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

But the combination of a fall in the oil price and lower interest rates has renewed pressure on the rouble, which has tumbled by more than 40 per cent against the US dollar in the past 12 months, making it the worst performer globally.

“We are anxious by the developments in recent days which strongly recall preparation for more military actions,” Lavrov told a news conference, accusing Kiev of breaking the terms of a ceasefire. But despite pledges to withdraw heavy caliber weapons from the front lines, both sides seem to be engaged in recent heavy fighting.

In a newspaper interview published over the weekend, Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the situation “explosive” and urged both sides to prevent it from spiraling out of control.

The conflict has killed an estimated 6,400 people since April 2014, according to the United Nations.