Ukraine army shelling kills 5 civilians: DPR

At least five civilians have been killed in the Ukrainian army’s shelling of a residential area in the volatile eastern city of Gorlovka.

“Two children and three women were killed during a shelling attack on Gorlovka overnight," Russian news agency TASS quoted a security official of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) as saying on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army blamed pro-Russia forces for the escalation of violence in the war-ravaged region, saying two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 13 others were injured in attacks allegedly carried out by militants over the last 24 hours.

"Taking into account the intensification of the military actions, numerous provocations and the use of heavy weapons by the Russian-backed militants, the Ukrainian armed forces have suffered casualties along almost the whole of the demarcation line," Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council Spokesman Andriy Lysenko said.

Another Ukrainian military official also claimed that pro-Russia forces have intensified their offensives against the positions of the Ukrainian army.

Pro-Russians “attacked Ukrainian army positions 21 times in the area of Donetsk from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning. They fired heavy cannon artillery and tanks ten times on the Ukrainian troops there," Yevhen Sylkin said.

This is while Eduard Basurin, a representative of the defense department of the DPR, rejected Kiev’s allegations, saying the Ukrainian army has deployed over 40 pieces of heavy military equipment, including multiple launch rocket systems, over the line of conflict.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also confirmed the increasing military activity by both sides in the violence-wracked eastern Ukraine.

"Our monitors on the ground have spotted tanks in fire positions on both sides of the contact line," OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission spokesman Michael Bociurkiw said in Kiev.

The conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine after people in Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea voted for reunification with Russia in March 2014. The situation exacerbated after Kiev dispatched troops to the eastern Ukrainian regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in April 2014 in an attempt to quell pro-Russia protests there.

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