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February 17, Russian occupation troops fired Stanytsia Luhanska, a Kyiv-controlled settlement in Luhansk region, with heavy artillery weapons. The shells hit the building of a kindergarten. Two civilians were injured, the press center of the Joint Forces operation reported.
“In a horribly cynical way, the Russian occupation troops shelled the village of Stanytsia Luhanska in the Luhansk region. The terrorists used heavy artillery weapons, their shells hit the building of a kindergarten. According to preliminary data, two civilians received shell-shock,” the report says.
The local infrastructure was also damaged, half of the settlement suffers from the power outage.
The servicemen of the Joint Forces Operation promptly evacuated civilians to a shelter.
Local train station, as well as locomotive depot came under shelling too. The station and depot workers were not injured. One diesel locomotive was damaged. Depot buildings were targeted as well.
Since the beginning of the day, the militants have violated the ceasefire 29 times.
In 2019, Stanytsia Luhanska became one of the first withdrawal sections, from which military equipment was withdrawn as part of the Minsk peace deal implementation. Currently, there is a pedestrian checkpoint across the demarcation line. One of the entry-exit checkpoints is located in Stanytsia Luhanska, often its operation is blocked by the Russian-backed militants.
Read also: 140,000 Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s borders, no signs of stand-down, – latest data from Kyiv
According to the latest data, about 140,000 Russian troops are concentrated at the borders of Ukraine. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense does not record the real withdrawal of Russian troops, as claimed by the Kremlin. Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov told this in an interview with RBC-Ukraine.
“As of this morning February 16, according to the report of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, unfortunately, we have not recorded a real withdrawal of troops, which the Russian Federation claims,” Reznikov said.
“To be honest we react to the reality we have and we don’t see any withdrawal yet. We just heard about it,” Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky stated in his recent interview with BBC.
According to UNICEF, ever 14,000 people have been killed. Nearly 3 million Ukrainians, including a million elderly people and half a million children, urgently need food, shelter, and other life-saving assistance. An estimated, 1.8 million people in eastern Ukraine require humanitarian assistance. Many residents in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces had to leave their homes after Russian forces invaded.
