Donetsk, Aug 31 - DAN. The Donetsk People’s Republic delegation at the Minsk talks called for an extraordinary meeting of the subgroup on security issues as tensions mounted on the contact line in Donbass, DPR representative at the Contact Group talks, the Republic’s Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova said on Tuesday.
“We have initiated an extraordinary round of talks of the security subgroup at 11:00 tomorrow, September 1 with the view of urgent adoption of effective measures to stop escalation on the contact line, of which we notified Head of the OSCE SMM, Ambassador Cevik (Yasar Cevik, Head of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine since May 2019 - eds Donetsk News Agency),” Nikonorova said in a statement.
The DPR Office at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) reported that Ukrainian forces had fired nearly 300 rounds of ammunition at the DPR territory since August 25. As a result of the strikes, five civilians were wounded and 17 houses, four infrastructure facilities and two vehicles were damaged. Nikonorova explained the mounting tensions by the upcoming meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and U.S. President Joe Biden. “Today, we again observe Kiev’s attempt to “do a service” to Washington,” she said.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that a considerable part of our reports on outrageous violations of the ceasefire by Ukrainian armed formations and their aftermath, which we forward to the OSCE SMM and the Contact Group coordinator for passing them to Ukraine, are left without any reaction on the part of Kiev, and sometimes are not even sent out,” Nikonorova said.
The package of tighter ceasefire control measures has been in effect in Donbass since July 27, 2020. The document bans the use of all weapons, deployment of hardware, special operations, engineer works and unmanned aerial vehicle flights.*jk