Donbas military conflict intensifying

The military conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine has intensified with thousands of daily violations to the Minsk peace accords, said on April 15 Alexander Hug, the first deputy head of the OSCE mission in Ukraine. “We have observed increased use of artillery and mortars,” he told a press conference in Donetsk after touring the area and speaking with officials locally. “More often, we have reported an absence of hardware in storage locations and then later see it along the conflict line.” Both sides have been increasingly employing the use of land mines, he said. The most active fighting is the Avdiyivka and Yasynuvata locations, where the ceasefire is violated more than 4,000 times in a single day, he said. “Armed conflicts have been so intense that sometimes it was difficult to count the incidents,” he said of these regions.

New armaments, fuel sources and military hardware arrived recently to the Debaltseve railway hub in occupied Donbas, reported on April 17 the main intelligence administration of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine. The hardware included three tanks and two Grad anti-aircraft rocket launchers.

Zenon Zawada: While flare-ups in the Donbas region used to often have direct relationship to the Minsk talks, that cause-and-effect link has been lost since the start of the new year. The Russian government is well aware that the West will expect a serious attempt by the new Ukrainian government to hold elections and implement the special status by the summer. Intensifying the military conflict at a gradual, consistent level creates more chances to undermine the fragile new government’s desperate attempts to somehow balance EU demands for elections in the occupied territories with the Ukrainian public’s rejection of the planned special status. The Minsk accords are a failure in Western diplomacy and the plans for special status should be scrapped in favor of a new approach.