Russian-supplied artillery shells and rockets were used to devastating effect against Ukraine's personnel and armor units. They used scatterable land mine munitions that hit tanks at their most vulnerable points and thermobaric warheads, which ignite and kill everything within several acres. One three-minute combined rocket and thermobaric attack wiped out two Ukrainian mechanized battalions in Zelenopillya, Karber said.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...yria/73595252/

“A drone showed up in the sky before every episode of shelling,” he says. “We were trying to hit it but we lacked the ammunition to be able to do that. After every shelling, we carried our wounded across the Russian border as it was impossible for us to transport them through Ukrainian territory. So in the morning we were handing over our wounded to Russians as a report on their work.”
Denys and his unit saw a massacre at Zelenopillya on 11 July, where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were killed by Grads. “We saw a glow from that [the attack at Zelenopillya] because we were not far away from them. They burned them alive, they [the Ukrainian soldiers] didn’t even manage to jump out from trucks,” he says. “On the next day the same started to us.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...e-burned-alive

Ukrainian soldier from the 79th Mykolaiv airmobile brigade Kostiantyn Poliakov wrote on Facebook that the first battalion of the 79th brigade had been almost completely destroyed during a night attack.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry later reported that 19 soldiers were killed and 93 were wounded in the attack on Zelenopillya.
All the wounded were in extremely grave condition. They were sent to the best Ukrainian doctors, who described what they saw as 'hell' and confessed they had never seen such severe wounds before.
Nurses who took care of the wounded used to faint. "These are wounded men who lost their eyes, legs.
Read more on UNIAN: http://www.unian.info/war/1099656-uk...-year-ago.html

Some in the east feel abandoned, stuck between Syria and a ceasefire they are reluctant to respect. Fighters insist that the war is not over – it’s only the tactics that have changed.

“Our republic is not yet independent – it depends on help from Russia,” said Aleksey Markov, a nuclear physicist from Moscow and Shevchenko’s second-in-command. “We must first take more land, more industry, more cities. Only then can we finish the war.”

Peotr Berykov, another of the Ghost Brigade’s upper ranks, accuses Moscow of threatening to withhold humanitarian aid to prevent rebels from taking unilateral action. “The Kremlin tells us: ‘An offensive would be bad politically. Wait. Otherwise we won’t send our white trucks’,” he said. “Without their help, civilians will starve.”

The Ukrainian government will stop withdrawing light weapons from the frontline of its war against separatists in the east if the pro-Russian rebels continue to violate a ceasefire, a senior security official said on Wednesday.
Fighting between Ukrainian forces and separatists in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions has killed more than 8,000 people since it started in mid-April 2014.
A ceasefire has broadly held since September, but both sides accuse each other of an increase in violations.
Oleksander Turchynov, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, said there had been nine ceasefire violations by the rebels in the past 24 hours alone.

Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/04/us-ukraine-crisis-arms-idUSKCN0ST21520151104#f7yaK43qxXpmBko2.99

Russia is not fully abiding by the terms of the Minsk peace deal for Ukraine and this will be taken into account by the European Union when it reviews its sanctions on Russia before the end of the year, the chairman of EU leaders said on Wednesday.
It is "clear that the Minsk agreements (are) not yet fully implemented. This will need to be reflected in upcoming EU sanctions review," Donald Tusk said on Twitter.

Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/04/us-ukraine-russia-eu-sanctions-idUSKCN0ST1YR20151104#5AHIfOhx341YpgHm.99

Both protest and negotiations were held also in Kyiv. Around 200 Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians gathered in protest outside the President’s Administration on Saturday evening. It was later reported that Crimean Tatar leaders and Ukrainian MPs Mustafa Dzhemiliev and Refat Chubarov had spoken with President Petro Poroshenko for 40 minutes.

Lenur Islyamov also presented the position of those carrying out the blockade. Certainly the Crimean Tatars who initiated the blockade deny any part in what by the morning of Nov 20 was very obviously deliberate destruction of the pylons bringing electricity to Crimea. Mustafa Dzhemiliev, Chubarov and other Crimean Tatar leaders have, however, consistently called for blockades as a means of forcing Russia to stop grossly violating the rights of Crimean Tatars, ethnic Ukrainians and any who oppose Russian occupation.

Western leaders who met on the margins of last week's Group of 20 summit in Turkey agreed to extend sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine by six months until July of next year, a senior European diplomat told Reuters.