September 5. /TASS/. The Ukrainian military over past 24 hours violated the ceasefire regime four times and made five provocations, the militia of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] said on Saturday.
“At 3 at night, Kiev’s military fired on Veselaya Gora; at 9:52p.m. they fired from a machine-gun from Popasnaya on Molodezhnoye,” the LuhanskInformCentre quoted a representative of the militia.
The republic’s defence ministry said Kiev’s military had organised several provocations.
“At 6:25 p.m. near Nizhneye [controlled by Kiev] we fixed an explosion from a 120-mm mortar or self-propelled artillery,” the representative said. “The fire was made from the Krymskoye settlement.”
Minsk accords on settlement of crisis in Ukraine
A peace deal struck on February 12 in Minsk, Belarus, by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and people’s militias starting from February 15, followed by withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of military engagement and prisoner release.
The package of measures envisages the pullback of all heavy weapons by both parties to locations equidistant from the disengagement line in order to create a security zone at least 50 kilometres wide for artillery systems with a calibre of 100 mm or more, a zone of security 70 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers and a zone 140 kilometres wide for multiple rocket launchers Tornado-S, Uragan and Smerch and for Tochka-U tactical rocket systems.
The Ukrainian forces and the self-defence forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], the violence in Ukraine has killed 6,500 people in the past year, wounded 16,000 and left 5 million people in need of humanitarian aid. With more than 1.3 million registered IDPs, Ukraine has now the ninth largest number of internally displaced in the world, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
USAREUR plans to repaint its tanks and other armored vehicles from desert tan to woodland green, in a move that comes amid eastern NATO members’ concerns about Russia’s alleged role in the ongoing civil war in Ukraine, US media reports said.
The West has repeatedly accused Moscow of backing supporters of the Donbass region’s independence in eastern Ukraine, allegations Russia vehemently rejects.
Members of the US Army 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, unload Bradley Fighting Vehicles at the railway station near the Rukla military base in Lithuania, on October 4, 2014
As for the current color of USAREUR’s military equipment, it was previously selected for operations in the Middle East.
USAREUR commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges specifically stressed the importance of the latest decision.
“It is about deterrence and reassurance, and paint — all of a sudden that matters,” he was quoted by the US newspaper Stars and Stripes as saying.
He made the comments during this week’s tour of USAREUR’s Coleman Barracks in the German city of Manheim, where nearly 200 Bradley fighting vehicles, tanks and other heavy vehicles are due to be used by troops rotating through Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
In June 2015, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter promised that the US will deploy heavy weapons, including tanks, armored vehicles and artillery, in a number of European nations in the next few months. In particular, the military hardware is set to be delivered to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.
The deployment would reportedly include 250 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzer artillery guns.
Earlier this year, Hodges went as far as warning that NATO should remain united in the face of what he described as a “real threat,” allegedly emanating from Russia.
September 4. /TASS/. The four key conditions of political settlement in Ukraine are not implemented by Kiev, whereas the proposed changes are of a purely declarative nature, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.
“The four principal conditions of political settlement are unfortunately just not implemented by our colleagues in Kiev,” Putin told journalists.
“As regards these tragic events [in front of the Verkhovna Rada in Kiev], I believe it is in no way connected with amendments to the Constitution, because all proposed as changes there today is absolutely declarative and in essence does not change the structure of power in Ukraine,” he said.
“Amendments to the Constitution are used exclusively as a pretext to intensify the struggle for power,” Putin said.
Further events in Ukraine, he said, depend on how long the country’s people will tolerate the situation. Putin said agreement of amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution between Kiev and Donbas is “the most important and principled thing”.
“If we speak about the Minsk Agreements, I will recall: amendments to the Constitution should be coordinated with Donbas; the law on elections to local self-government bodies should be coordinated with Donbass; the law on amnesty should be adopted – it is not; and the law on a special status of these territories should be enacted – it has been adopted, but its enactment has been postponed again,” the Russian head of state said.
Speaking of Ukraine’s further fate, Putin said the country has been put under external control.
“All key posts in the government and in key regions are held by foreigners - I think it is an insult to the Ukrainian people,” he said. “Does Ukraine not have honest people and competent government officials?”
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