D.P.R. Appeals to UN as Heavy Shelling Hits Donetsk

Dec. 15, 2022 (EIRNS)—A barrage of 40 Grad rockets hit the Voroshilovsky District of Donetsk at 7:00 this morning, in what is said to be the biggest attack to hit the city since the Kiev regime began the war in 2014. According to the Donetsk News Agency, damage had been caused to the Transfiguration Cathedral, Forum Mall, Stolichny business center, teaching blocks of the Donetsk National Technical University, a school, a kindergarten, and apartment buildings. Damage assessment was still ongoing as of the time of the report.

D.P.R. leader Denis Pushilin said this morning that the Ukrainian forces used not Soviet-era Grad launchers but Czech launchers that fire the same rockets, but are modernized with auto-loaders. “Previously, the Armed Forces of Ukraine [AFU] saved time and produced only half of the package,” he said in a TV interview. “Today they attacked residential areas, kindergartens, and the cathedral. Nine people were injured, there is one dead.”

The rocket barrage occurred after a press conference in Donetsk called to highlight the deliberate shelling of civilian areas by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The D.P.R. Foreign Ministry said on its Telegram account that the speakers at the press conference paid special attention to the facts of the use of NATO-supplied rocket and artillery weapons by the AFU, and also provided evidence of indiscriminate and targeted shelling of places of mass congestion.

D.P.R. ombudsperson Darya Morozova reported that she has appealed to the UN over the looming humanitarian disaster from the Ukrainian bombardment of the republic. “The obvious aim of these inhumane actions from Kiev is a campaign of terror directed against the Donbass civilians and their systematic destruction, as well as causing maximum damage to the civil infrastructure and facilities that are under the protection of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” TASS quotes the letter to the UN.

Natalia Shutkina, the deputy head of the D.P.R. mission to the Office at the Joint Center for Control and Coordination of issues related to Ukraine’s war crimes, reported that more than 15,000 D.P.R. residents have been killed by Kiev artillery attacks during the Donbass war. “Kiev won’t stop its armed terror,” Shutkina said. “In the D.P.R. alone, more than 15,000 of our fellow citizens have been killed over these long years, including children, women and elderly people.”  She called the latest upsurge of fighting that began on Feb. 17, 2022, the deadliest escalation during the whole conflict. “Ukrainian armed formations have killed 4,527 civilians including 154 children and wounded another 4,317 including 274 children since Feb. 17,” Shutkina said.