The intensity of shelling in eastern Ukraine has significantly decreased as of Feb. 5, a Ukrainian military spokesman said.
This is after a week of intense fighting which has killed at least 10 Ukrainian soldiers and about a dozen of civilians reported to be killed by either side.
Leonid Matyukhin, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military, said that Russian troops and their separatist proxies halved the frequency of shelling over the past 24 hours.
He added that two Ukrainian soldiers were injured over this period – a huge decrease in the number of casualties in comparison with the previous week.
This stabilization in the fighting coincided with the phone call between Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump early on Feb. 5, where both leaders “stressed on the need for establishing immediate cease-fire regime,” according to Poroshenko’s press service.
Ukraine’s former Prime Minister and influential lawmaker Yulia Tymoshenko separately held a brief meeting with Trump on Feb. 2 in Washington. Several western media reported that Tymoshenko later claimed at the informal meeting at a Washington-based conservative think tank that Trump assured her he would “not abandon” Ukraine.
Tymoshenko’s spokeswoman Maryna Soroka confirmed this meeting took place to the Kyiv Post.
Meanwhile, electricity supplies haven’t been restored in Avdiyivka, a small city in the Donetsk region, that became an epicenter of the recent fighting. Electricity cables were destroyed there because of the fighting a week ago.
At least three Avdiyivka residents were killed by the shelling and dozens of houses were damaged in the city.
Some 20,000 of its residents were on the verge of humanitarian crisis, living without electricity, and with minimal heating and water supplies.
Donetsk Oblast Governer Pavlo Zhebrivsky said on Feb. 5 that 248 people left the city over the week of fighting, which is less than it was expected.
He added despite the lack of electricity that local suppliers had managed to keep the houses of Avdiyivka warm.
“There is gas and heating in the flats. The water supply is being done according to a time-table,” Zhebrivsky said on his Facebook page.
