There are a significant amount of reports of shelling and even small arms fire between Donetsk and Gorlovka at the moment. This account is compiling and translating reports from various sources:
There are reports this evening that Dzerzhynsk, a Ukrainian-held village north-east of Gorlovka, is being shelled.
Translation: #Dzerzhynsk it's started LOUD...
Translation: Seems like it's incoming
Translation: #Dzerzhynsk Incoming came from Gorlovka, flying over our heads, I'm in Artyomovo now.
Translation: #Dzerzhynsk: B*****s, they're fanning out across the town. Already falling practically next to us.
Translation: What the... ? The lights have been flickering for about 5-10 minutes now in Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Krasny Liman.
Translation: #Dzerzhynsk Artyomovo. Oh guys, everything is f****d up. Ours are responding too. There's no power.
Translation: #Gorlovka something serious is burning up. They've warned the whole town to take cover. The Russian militants have got something planned.
-- Pierre Vaux
Ihor Markov, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and a staunch supporter of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass, has been arrested by Italian police on an international Interpol arrest warrant that was issued by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry. Unian reports:
UNIAN memo. Ihor Markov was elected an MP in single-mandate constituency No133 in Odesa in the 2012 parliamentary elections, then joining the Party of Regions.
On September 12, 2013 the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine ordered the Central Election Commission to cancel Markov’s mandate for voting falsifications.
In October 2013, police had arrested Markov on suspicion of beating the protesters in Odesa in 2007. Ministry of Internal Affairs referred to the events of 2007 when the nationalists held pickets near the Odesa regional administration against erupting of a monument to Catherine II.
In February 2014, Markov’s mandate was renewed and he was released from custody.
Markov is a key leader of the "Committee To Save Ukraine," also known as the "Salvation Committee," a new group of former Ukrainian officials who now live in Russia and are forming a government in exile. This picture shows Markov (closest to the camera) at the launch event for this new committee.
Not everyone is happy about this development, however. Protesters, amongst them, members of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, picketed the Italian embassy in Moscow.
Konstantin Dolgov, one of the leaders of Russia's Anti-Maidan movement, tweeted:
Translation: Photo from today's picket at the Italian embassy in support of illegally arrested Igor Markov
Also, the Russian state propaganda outlet RT is calling Markov the "dissident" politician.
-- James Miller
Yaroslav Chepurnoy, press officer for the Ukrainian military headquarters in Mariupol, has told the 112 television news channel that two civilians were wounded in Andreyevka after Russian-backed forces shelled the village with Grad rockets this afternoon.
Chepurnoy said that Russian-backed fighters have deliberately targeted civilians, as there are no Ukrainian troops in the village.
Both casualties have been taken by the Ukrainian army to a hospital in Volnovakha.
Several homes have been burnt down.
-- Pierre Vaux
The pro-separatist Donetsk News Agency (DAN) reports a separatist military spokesman has told reporters today that Ukraine has sent "personnel from a private military company, all of them of the negroid race" to the front line.
Eduard Basurin, deputy commander of the armed forces of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' (DNR), claimed that DNR military intelligence had recorded the arrival of the "black mercenaries" in the village of Starognatovka, east of Volnovakha and the scene of heavy fighting on Monday.
Claims of black fighters amongst the Ukrainian ranks have popped up several times before in Russian and pro-separatist media.
In February this year, during the battle for Debaltsevo, Russia's LifeNews television channel carried an absurd report, citing local 'eyewitness reports' that:
"armoured personnel carriers are driving through the street with dancing, drunken negroes atop.."
DAN reports that the DNR 'defence ministry' has claimed that morale has fallen so low in the Ukrainian military that foreign mercenaries have had to be brought in to make up numbers.
Combining endemic racist and xenophobic attitudes with the suggestion that foreign, possibly American, troops are fighting for Kiev is a popular trope for Russian-language pro-separatist media.
Of course, such reports are not carried by the English-language wings of Russian-state media.
-- Pierre Vaux