While Russia announced on Tuesday the partial withdrawal of its men deployed on the outskirts of Ukraine, without convincing Westerners, a school in the east of the country was hit by a shell on the morning of Thursday, February 17. The diplomatic crisis around Ukraine is getting more tense every day. On the one hand, the pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, as well as 100,000 Russian soldiers deployed near the border; on the other, the Ukrainian government, supported in particular by the United States.
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Franceinfo takes stock of this symbolic attack, which took place the day before the launch of the annual conference in Munich, Germany. The Ukrainian crisis should largely be dealt with there.
Three injured in the attack
Thursday, February 17, at 8:45 a.m., a shell ripped open the wall of a kindergarten in Stanitsa Luganska, a small town of 12,000 inhabitants in eastern Donbass. This region bordering Russia has been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. Stanitsa Luganska is located precisely on the line of contact between the pro-Russian separatist regions and the rest of Ukraine.
In the school sports hall on Thursday, broken bricks mixed with soccer balls, according to France 2. About twenty children were present in the establishment, but they had their breakfast upstairs . The pUkrainian police released a video of their evacuation. Three employees were injured, no child was physically injured. No deaths are to be deplored.
Strikes that multiply
Several other attacks were observed on Thursday in the urban area of Lugansk, 409,000 inhabitants, including the Stanitsa Luganska school. “Enemy shelling damaged the building of a kindergarten, power lines, a gas pipeline and destroyed two private houses”according to a report published by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on Friday, February 18 in the morning. Half of the population is without electricity.
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More broadly, heavy weapon strikes increased on Thursday in the Donbass region. The small village of Vrubivka, 90 km west of the attacked school, was hit, for example, according to the Ukrainian government: “IRussian armed forces fired artillery pieces (…) and damaged the building of a local secondary school, a gas pipeline and a private house.” On Thursday alone, “60 ceasefire violations, including 43 with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements”have been identified by the Ukrainian government.
Wider, 130 to 190 ceasefire violations are recorded every day, recalls thea great reporter Maryse Burgot, special correspondent for France 2. It is not possible to verify who is responsible for each violation.
Both sides blame each other
In a statement released Thursday evening, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry judged Russia “responsible for the situation in the temporarily occupied territories”. “Any damage that may be caused to people or infrastructure in the temporarily occupied territories is a provocation”he believes, while the actions of Ukraine “are purely defensive”.
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On their side, thehe separatists in Luhansk have accused Kiev of being responsible for an increase in bombardments for “to push the conflict towards an escalation”explains AFP on Friday. The Kremlin has estimated that the “extreme concentration of Ukrainian forces” was responsible for this situation “extremely dangerous”.
A “pretext” to intervene?
The attacks are numerous. But in the case of the strike on the school in Stanitsa Luganska, “very symbolic”that “could be the start of a spiral that would lead to total war”believes Maryse Burgot, of France 2.
Russia expressed its “deep concern”without stopping its negotiations. The Kremlin unrolled once again on Thursday the catalog of its strategic demands to the West, who have for the most part already rejected them. Moscow is calling in particular a “renouncement of any future enlargement of NATO”, to Ukraine in particular. In case of refusal, “Russia will be forced to react, in particular by implementing measures of a military and technical nature”she threatened.
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The British and Americans consider that with this attack Moscow could serve as a pretext to intervene in the conflict which has pitted the Ukrainian army against the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass for eight years. This operation, according to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is “designed to discredit Ukrainians” and “creating a false provocation justifying Russian action”. An opinion shared by the American president: Joe Biden repeated Thursday that Russia was preparing a “false alarm”.
So far absent from the Ukrainian conflict, China joined the debate on Thursday. During the meeting of the United Nations Security Council, the Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun said: “The steady expansion of NATO, in the wake of the Cold War, runs counter to our times.”