#MinskMonitor: Russia Fires Across the Border

Ukrainian border guards fired at north of Luhansk

On February 8, the Ukrainian Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) Press Center reported that Russian forces fired “provocation” shots towards Ukrainian border guards stationed north of Luhansk. There were no injuries from the incident, and the Ukrainian border guards did not return fire. A map provided by the Ukrainian Embassy to the United Kingdom showed where the incident took place, near the Russian village of Ushakovka and Ukrainian village of Harasymivka.

Hromadske also provided a map of the situation, in which the red line indicated the area of control between the Ukrainian government and the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR).

As of this article’s publishing time, there have been no photographs or videos released of the incident at the border.

Previous border skirmish at this location

Though was no corroborated evidence around this incident; however, it would not be the first time Russian soldiers opened fire against Ukrainian border agents in this area.

In December 2014, a Ukrainian hacker group called the “Ukrainian Cyber Forces” released dozens of gigabytes of data from the Russian Interior Ministry, including thousands of documents from their officials in the Rostov Oblast, near the Ukrainian border. Almost all of the leaked documents were uninteresting, but at least one was noteworthy: an August 2014 account of a border skirmish just a few kilometers north of Ushakovka, the village where today’s incident took place.

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