On August 3, the Department of Strategic Communications at the Defense Ministry published a statement which says that for the seventh year now Russia has been pursuing the policy of aggression against Ukraine. The ministry has presented information on the amount of weapons that Russia has supplied to separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Here’s an excerpt from the ministry’s statement, “The Russian Federation has been waging war against Ukraine for seven years in succession. The amount of weapons and military equipment concentrated in the occupied areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions is well known: 480 tanks, more than 900 armored vehicles, almost 450 guns and howitzers, 300 mine launchers, 210 multiple launch rocket systems, 700 anti-aircraft defense units, 450 anti-tank guns”.

The ministry notes in its statement that all these weapons and military equipment have been brought to Ukraine via that section of the Russian-Ukrainian border that is not under Ukrainian control. These lethal arms have been used both against Ukrainian soldiers and civilian population.

“Russia’s threat to increase arms supplies is evidence of direct armed aggression and support of terrorist activities at the state level”, the ministry concludes.
The statement of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has come as an answer to Leonid Kalashnikov, head of the Russian State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, who said that Russia “should not be ashamed of legally supplying weapons” to military groupings of the LNR and DNR in Donbas if the United States approves 300 million dollars of annual military aid to Ukraine.

In this regard, the Defense Ministry stresses that Ukraine receives technical aid from partner States in accordance with international contracts. “And the present-day situation is not an exception. Ukraine is grateful to international partners for their support in its struggle against the aggressor”, the Ministry states.

This June, the U.S. Congress approved the 250-million-dollar military aid package for Ukraine in the defense budget for the fiscal year 2020. On July 18, the United States approved the sale of 16 modern patrol boats Mark VI to Ukraine and the attendant equipment in the amount of 600 million dollars. And on July 31, a bill was submitted to the Senate granting 300 million dollars of annual military aid to Ukraine to resist Russian aggression.

As the Council for National Security and Defense of Ukraine (CNSD) meanwhile reports, the ceasefire regime in Donbas is kept successfully. In the past week there have been no casualties among Ukrainian soldiers.

At the same time the report of the CNSD specifies that there have been just a few shooting incidents but there have been no systemic violations of the ceasefire regime in the frontline.

Unlike previous attempts to achieve a stable ceasefire in the front that in reality lasted only for a couple of days, the current regime has been in force for the entire past week. Apart from this, there has been no shelling from heavy guns and there have been no military casualties.

The statistical data evidence that before the current ceasefire regime has been introduced there were from 16 to 18 incidents of shelling from heavy guns every day. And the daily losses of the Ukrainian army consisted of 2 to 3 killed and 6 to 8 wounded.

The same number of the killed and wounded was in military formations of pro-Russian militants.

The newspaper Holos Ukrainy