The Ukrainian military on Tuesday said that its troops came under heavy fire during a rebel attack, which killed one soldier and wounded several others.
The clash took place at several points near Zolote, a front-line village in the Luhansk region of Donbas. Ukrainian military officials claim that separatists attempted to breach Ukrainian lines and advance into Kyiv-controlled territory, but were repelled. Separatist authorities in the Luhansk region, however, claimed that Ukrainian troops had tried and failed to infiltrate rebel-held areas.
The Ukrainian Joint Forces Operation (JFO) HQ said that the intense shelling was similar to that of the violence of 2015, which had violated a framework ceasefire agreement that was signed earlier that year. Tuesday’s flare-up is one of the worst since a Paris summit in December which tried to bring parties together on implementing a peace deal, and it comes before a possible second summit on the same issue in Berlin later this year.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after meeting with the Ukrainian Security Council, said that the uptick in violence was an attempt to derail the peace process, which he said is progressing “with small but continuous steps.” Recent months have witnessed some positive moves towards a peace settlement, with significant prisoner exchanges between the parties and talks between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin mediated by France and Germany. Still, there is no clear agreement on contentious issues such as a timeline for local elections in Eastern Ukraine, or when the country could regain control of its borders in rebel-held regions.
Russia denied any involvement in the clashes. The Kremlin said that it had seen reports of the fighting in Donbas, and was looking into them, but did not know what had triggered the violence.
Image Source: Council on Foreign Relations