Donetsk Blog, April 29: Children Evacuated - Civilian Human Shields - Civilians Deliberately Attacked
Ukraine’s civil war is still very much ongoing. Both sides are exchanging fire. Civilians and soldiers continue to die on both sides.
DONi was recently founded by a Finnish journalist and Russian businessman whom we know, and we have every reason to believe that their reporting can be relied on as truthful. More information about the agency follows below this report.
Due to its slow, simmering nature, events in Novorossiya rarely make headlines, so people forget there is a real war going on.
Donetsk, Friday, April 29, 16.30 pm. Exclusive to Russia Insider
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At 2.40 am, April 27, the locality of Elenovka in the south of the DPR was shelled by the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars were mostly hit. They had been waiting in a line to pass through the only available checkpoint in the south of Donbass to Ukraine-controlled territory.
According to local residents, the Ukrainian military recently deliberately delayed the process involved in crossing checkpoints, resulting in huge queues forming on both sides of the contact line. Those who did not manage to cross the line before the checkpoint was closed had to spend the night in their cars on the road. These civilian cars appeared to be the aim of the Ukrainian artillery.
The DPR authorities reported that as a result of the attack, five civilians were killed on the spot, including a pregnant woman, and more than 10 were wounded, including a 15-year-old boy. All the wounded were taken to hospitals in Donetsk. According to doctors in the DPR, as of April 28, two of the wounded were in a serious condition.
Local eyewitnesses of the bombardment say that the cars ignited instantly, presumably as a result of direct hits, as when they were running into the street to take shelter in basements, they could see the cars already in flames.
The locality itself was also affected by the shelling, with seven houses and a local hospital damaged. An elderly local resident was awakened by the noise and saw that part of the wall of her house had collapsed. She says that she will from now on go down to the basement at night.
Another house, however, was hit directly in the basement entrance. The residents of the house are thankful that they did not go down to the basement that night, otherwise they would have been riddled with shrapnel. Now they do not know where to hide when next under bombardment.
The shelling of the civilian population was deliberate and purposeful. In the village of Elenovka there are neither DPR army positions nor their checkpoints. The Ukrainian side was well aware of this fact since, as locals report, a Ukrainian drone had the day before been circling over the locality for a long time.
The OSCE representatives arrived at the spot only a few hours later, although the Head of the DPR had met, on his way to Elenovka, two cars of the mission that were moving away from the village. The report of the mission says that the shelling was carried out from a south-western direction, where the positions of the Ukrainian army are situated, with weapons of at least 120mm caliber.
Kiev also hastened to announce their version of the tragedy in Elenovka. The head of the frontier unit in Kramatorsk, where the headquarters of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) is situated, stated that the people affected, including a pregnant woman, had blown themselves up in their cars. A Kiev military "expert" said that the militia had planted dummies instead of dead bodies to “discredit the Ukrainian military”.
Over the past few days, the DPR Defense Ministry warned of an extremely dangerous practice that the Ukrainian military had begun using at their checkpoints. By intentionally delaying the crossing, they forced civilians to spend the night near their checkpoints, forcing drivers to place their cars around Ukrainian positions at night.
The Ministry believed that the Ukrainian military authorities were using civilians as a human shield against possible attacks by the DPR. However, the events in Elenovka showed that Kiev needed civilian casualties. Kiev sought to either blame the armies of the Republics, or provoke them to open return fire. In both cases, Kiev would be able to declare the failure of the Minsk Agreements because of the Republics.
The next night at another checkpoint, the Ukrainian military made everyone who had not completed the crossing procedure to leave their cars and proceed to the DPR checkpoint on foot.
The dead and wounded in Elenovka were not the only victims of Kiev over the past three days. Two days before, a 72-year-old woman was wounded in a bombardment of the northern outskirt of Gorlovka, the largest city in the north of the DPR.
The day before, a Ukrainian sniper aimed shots at the head of the administrator of Zaitsevo, a Gorlovka suburb that the Ukrainian military has been shelling daily for many months. Fortunately, the DPR official escaped unscathed.
On the day of the attack at Elenovka, a young couple triggered a trip-wire mine when they were attempting to get from Kiev-controlled territory of the Lugansk region to LPR territory. The only roadblock there had been closed some time ago, forcing the locals to try and cross the contact line using forest trails, many of which are mined.
The day before the tragedy in Elenovka, an orphanage on the northern outskirts of Donetsk was also bombarded with mortars by the Ukrainian side. At the time of the bombardment, there were children in the orphanage. However, their teachers were luckily able to get them into the basement in time.
In addition, according to documents obtained by DPR intelligence, the local authorities of Mariupol, the largest Kiev-controlled city in the south of the Donbass, received an order to prepare the evacuation of children “due to a possible escalation of the situation” in this sector of the front.
It seems that Kiev is seeking a reason to resume active hostilities in Donbass at any cost. The strict requirements of the West to implement the Minsk Agreements, announced in Kiev by Victoria Nuland three days ago, are provoking strong opposition from radical nationalists, who in social networks are already accusing Poroshenko of high treason.
It is not excluded that Kiev is delivering on a large scale, as DPR intelligence reports, nationalist battalion personnel to Donbass, wishing to relocate them from the capital and to liquidate them on the eastern front at the hands of the Republics. Kiev also continues to amass on the front heavy weaponry, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery systems, anti-air missile-systems, and dozens of trucks carrying ammunition (see below pictures of weapons mentioned).
Information on weapons mentioned in this article
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A mortar is a tube-like cannon which fires a projectile which explodes upon impact. They have ranges of up to 3 miles
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A tank T-72
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An infantry fighting vehicle
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An armoured personnel carrier
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A 122mm motorised artillery system “Gvozdika”
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An anti-aircraft system ZU-23
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An Ural truck
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A KamAZ truck
The Donetsk International News Agency is a private, non-profit information agency located in the center of the city of Donetsk. It is headed by Finnish journalist, Janus Putkonen and has 10 full time journalists on staff. Approximately half of them are natives of Western European countries. Its website is: www.dninews.com
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