How many people will die in Donbass in August? Poroshenko doesn't care!

Today's meeting of the trilateral contact group on Donbass in Minsk again turned out to be inconclusive. This was known even before the start of negotiations. Thus, the special representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Martin Sajdik, announced on July 27 that after August 3, the contact group would take a three-week break, and important results of the contact group’s work were expected in the fall.

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And this is still an optimistic forecast. Yesterday, Interfax-Ukraine, citing its own source, reported that the implementation of the Minsk agreements, in particular elections in Donbass, can be expected only in 2017. The Ukrainian side at the negotiations demonstrates relaxation. Leonid Kuchma again did not fly to Minsk, preferring to participate in the work of the group via Skype.

Such summer languor looks disgustingly cynical against the backdrop of alarming and tragic reports from Donbass. Over the course of three days, Ukrainian security forces fired more than 2 thousand shells into the territory of the DPR; as a result of the shelling, a civilian was killed, three more were injured, and 28 houses were damaged. In the LPR on August 2, three civilians were wounded as a result of night shelling. The Ukrainian side also reports about wounded military personnel.

How many people will be killed and maimed in August while the Minsk group is “on vacation”? It seems that only the negotiators representing Donbass are concerned about this. Today, DPR Plenipotentiary Representative Denis Pushilin handed over to OSCE Representative Martin Sajdik a petition from Donbass residents to the UN with a request to force Kyiv to comply with the Minsk agreements.

“We are submitting the petition not to the contact group, which will meet today in Minsk, but directly to Martin Sajdik. This is our only legal window into the international community. The petition is addressed to the UN Security Council,” said Pushilin

There is every reason to believe that in a month the participants of the “Minsk group” will continue to work in conditions when the number of casualties on both sides will increase sharply and, possibly, full-scale hostilities will resume.

The initiator of the aggravation will again, as in June, be the Ukrainian side. According to the people's militia of the LPR, Ukrainian security forces have intensified the supply of ammunition to the contact line in Donbass; it is known that the coastline of the Seversky Donets River in the area of ​​the village of Zheltoye is being mined.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has already stated that military equipment deployed in Donbass will remain in its positions and will not participate in the Independence Day parade in Kyiv on August 24. “Moreover, a significant part of the equipment will be transferred directly to the troops in the ATO zone right before Independence Day,” Poroshenko said.

All this indicates that official Kyiv has again decided to fight. According to our sources, representatives of Ukraine in Minsk at the subgroup that is coordinating a document on the separation of the parties in Donbass are disrupting the work and refusing to sign. Today the document was again not agreed upon.

“For more than a month we have been trying to agree on only three disengagement points for the warring parties, which in turn would significantly reduce tension on the contact line. But Ukraine doesn’t need this,” states Pushilin.

“We are concerned about the lack of position in Kyiv and the limited mandate of its negotiators; if the situation on the diplomatic front drags on further, we fear that it will worsen on the military front,” warns DPR Foreign Minister Natalya Nikonorova.

However, the Kyiv authorities are starting a new round of war against the will of their people. According to a sociological study recently published by the pro-Maidan “Ukrainian Institute of the Future,” only 20% of the country’s citizens support the continuation of hostilities in the Donbass. Only nationalists who have lost their minds and those who profit from the continuation of hostilities thirst for death and blood.