The “summer cease-fire” in the Donbas, agreed at the meeting in Minsk on June 27, started all along the 426-kilometers contact line of Russia’s war against Ukraine in the Donbas at midnight on July 1 and was supposed to last for at least two months.
It didn’t even last two hours.
Russian-led forces violated the cease-fire twice in the first hours after its official start, the Ukrainian Army’s Joint Forces Operation press service reported on Facebook early on July 1. The Joint Forces Operation or JFO is the name of Ukraine’s military campaign to defend the country from Kremlin aggression.
“The enemy fired mortars at Ukrainian positions in the Horlivka area, near the village of Zaytseve in Donetsk Oblast. And in Luhansk Oblast Russian-led forces used grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and other weapons against the Ukrainian army near the village Novooleksandrivka,” reads the message posted on the JFO’s Facebook page on July 1.
One enemy armored vehicle hit a landmine, leaving one enemy soldier wounded, the JFO press service said.
The summer cease-fire was agreed between Ukraine, Russia and Russian-led forces in the Donbas in Minsk on June 27, according to Darka Olifer, the spokesperson of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who is the official representative of Ukrainein the negotiations process.
The Ukrainian Army has already published a statement promising to stick to the cease-fire regime. Russia has not issued any promises.
Yevgenij Marchuk, a Ukrainian politician and one of the Ukrainian representatives at the Minsk negotiations, said on June 27 that Russia was rejecting all of the proposals made by Ukraine.
“Our discussion about the cease-fire started with harsh finger-pointing and accusations,” Marchuk wrote on Facebook on June 27. “We proposed a discussion about all parts of the cease-fire process, starting with intensified round-the-clock monitoring by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission of the part of the Ukrainian-Russian border that is not controlled by the government.”
“There is a single aim for that: for the OSCE SMM to record and document all cases of Russia making illegal mass supplies of weapons to its proxies in the Donbas.”
But the Kremlin refused to meet this condition “because Russia (says it) has nothing to do with the ceasefire,” Marchuk wrote.
“So according to Russian logic, the constant illegal weapons supplies to its forces in the Donbas have nothing to do with the ceasefire.”
The summer cease-fire was agreed after five hours of negotiations, Marchuk said.
More than 10,300 people have been killed in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which started in April 2014 when a group of Russian Special Forces soldiers started to take over police, security service and government offices in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east of Ukraine.
Every day, thousands of civilians now risk their lives in order to pass over the front line from the Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas to Ukraine-controlled territories in order to get to work, buy food,or collect their pensions, Olifer wrote on June 27.
And of all the sides in this war must do everything to save these people’s lives, Olifer added. However, not all the sides understand that, she said.
“For example workers of the Vodafone Ukraine mobile operator still can’t carry out the repairs to equipment needed to restore mobile phone services in the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas, due to lack of safety guarantees from Russian-led forces,” Olifer said.
