OSCE: Ceasefire violations increase

KYIV – The Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) says it has seen a “massive” increase in the number of ceasefire violations in eastern Ukraine in recent days. Michael Bociurkiw, the OSCE mission’s spokesman, said on April 15 in an interview with the BBC from Kyiv that monitors also reported “intensive fighting” between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces near the airport outside the rebel-held provincial capital of Donetsk and around the village of Shyrokyne, near the strategic government-held port city of Mariupol. Mr. Bociurkiw said the SMM monitors recorded more than 700 explosions near the Donetsk airport during a six-hour period on April 14. He added that the fighting sides are within a few hundred meters of each other near Shyrokyne and that shelling is coming from “densely populated residential areas.” Shyrokyne is just 10 kilometers from Mariupol, and the rebel attacks there have raised concerns that the separatists may seek to take the largest government-held city in the Donetsk region and push further westward toward Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in March 2014. Mr. Bociurkiw said Ambassador Ertugrul Apakan, the head of the OSCE’s SMM to Ukraine, has reiterated a call for a “comprehensive cease-fire” that includes the withdrawal of heavy weaponry. “We’ve seen yet again,” he said, “movement of heavy weaponry that should have been completely removed from the zone in which it’s being used.” The SMM in Ukraine officially monitors the fragile ceasefire agreed to in February in Minsk that has reduced the fighting in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 6,000 people in the past year. (RFE/RL)