What we know about Donbas attacks

It’s incredibly difficult to get a clear impression of who is firing at who, down in the contested areas of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. This is where the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists have been fighting since 2014.

International monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) talk of hundreds of ceasefire violations in their latest report, covering 17-18 February. Things have, if anything, escalated since then.

Their report speaks of impacts on both sides of the so-called “contact line”, which separates government-controlled territory from separatist-run areas. But there’s also a limit to what OSCE observers can see – they say that the armed rebels frequently deny them access.

The Ukrainian military says it will only return fire in “exceptional circumstances”, but it is reluctant to define this.

Government officials are also scrambling to keep up with what they describe as a torrent of fake news from the Russian-backed side. This morning a gruesome video which purported to show a child dismembered by a Ukrainian shell began circulating. An official accused separatists of taking corpses from morgues and blowing them up to stage this.

Another purported to show an alleged Ukrainian attack on a Russian border checkpoint. A Ukrainian official tells me that shells haven’t landed on Russian territory for the entire eight years of this war.