Heavy shelling of the war front city of Avdiivka, 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, in Donetsk Oblast continued into a third day on Jan 31. Meanwhile, authorities say they are preparing for mass evacuations of the residents, which numbered 35,000 people before the war started in 2014.
Video emerged overnight of Grad rockets, a heavy weapon banned from use under the Minsk agreements, being fired from the suburbs of the city of Donetsk, which is held by Russian-backed armed groups.
The Ukrainian military has reported that civilian areas of Avdiivka were hit by Grad rockets during the night, and more salvos of rockets were reported by eyewitnesses to have hit Avdiivka on the morning of Jan. 31. These reports were made over social media, and could not immediately be corroborated.
People’s Front lawmaker Yevhen Dayday said in a post on Facebook at 11:20 a.m. on Jan. 31 that the evacuation of the civilian population of Avdiivka had started.
“Right now the evacuation has started in the old part of Avdiivka due to heavy shelling by Grad rockets,” he wrote. “The situation is becoming even more critical.”
Electricity in the city was cut in the early hours of Jan. 30, and water and heat supplies were cut late that evening, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Zhebrivskyi reported in a post on Facebook overnight. Temperatures plunged to -18 degrees Celsius, and by the morning of Jan. 31 Ukraine’s Emergency Situations Service was announcing plans to carry out mass evacuations.
Due to the deteriorating humanitarian situation, a state of emergency was declared in the city in the evening of Jan. 30, Zhebrivskyi said.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry in a letter to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Jan. 30 also said that humanitarian situation in the area of Avdiivka was continuing to deteriorate.
In the letter, the ministry accused Russia directly of committing war crimes.
“Civilians suffer because of the shelling of the residential areas,” the letter read. “Such actions of the Kremlin may qualify as a war crime, a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions of Aug. 12, 1949, an unlawful, wanton and extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity.”
According to the head of the Emergency Situations Service, Mykola Chechetkin, there are plans to move 12,000 of the city’s residents to 10 cities further away from the front, using a fleet of 80 buses and two electric trains.
Meanwhile, the Joint Center for Coordination and Control, a liaison body that includes officers from the Ukrainian and Russian militaries, said there was to be a ceasefire from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to allow the evacuation of civilians from the areas worst affected by the fighting – the so-called “industrial zone” in the south and eastern portion of the town.
However, reports of shelling attacks on the town were still coming in over social media even after the ceasefire was supposed to have come into effect, although these reports could not be confirmed by the Kyiv Post.
Heavy fighting broke out in Avdiivka on Jan. 29, with the Ukrainian military reporting that Russian-backed fighters had attempted to dislodge Ukrainian forces from defensive positions at a key highway that links the anti-government stronghold of Donetsk with another town held by the Russian-backed armed groups – Horlivka – to the north.
Avdiivka has been a flashpoint for fighting during the three-year-long war in eastern Ukraine. The town was first captured by Russian-backed armed groups in mid-April 2014, as a 50-strong Russian special operations group led by Russian military intelligence officer Igor Girkin moved around the area, capturing police departments, security service offices, and local administration buildings in several towns.
Ukraine responded by launching military operations to retake control of towns held by Russian-backed anti-government forces. Ukrainian forces regained control of Avdiivka on July 21, 2014 amidst an offensive by government forces that wrested control of large areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts back from the control of Russian-backed armed groups.
However, that offensive was halted on the outskirts of the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk in late August 2014, when up to four battalions of Russian regular troops entered Ukraine to support the anti-government armed groups.
The intervention halted the Ukrainian forces’ offensive, and ushered in the current stalemate between the sides along a frontline running from the port city of Mariupol in southern Donetsk Oblast, to the city of Luhansk near Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
