SUMMARY

The SMM observed damage to two high-rise buildings and a hospital, indicating that they had recently been shelled. One man was killed and one injured in the vicinity of the hospital.

DETAIL

At 09:36hrs, the SMM in city-centre Donetsk heard a series of loud explosions, lasting six seconds, followed 30 minutes later by another series of explosions.

Based on information received from local sources, the SMM proceeded to a city-centre residential area two kilometres north of their initial location, where they observed two high-rise buildings that had evidently sustained serious damage, which the SMM assessed as being consistent with shelling.

In one of the buildings, a 15-storey residential block, there was a large 50cm-diameter hole in outer walls on both the fifth and thirteenth floors. All windows on both floors were shattered. Rescue and emergency personnel were present. They reported no casualties.

At a 17-storey high-rise building 200 metres away, the SMM observed a 50cm-diameter hole in the outer wall of the seventh floor and two 50cm-diameter holes in the outer walls of the fifteenth floor. All windows were shattered on the ground floor, and there were multiple traces of shrapnel in the aluminium façade of the wall.

Both buildings are less than 500 metres from the occupied SBU building. The area has been shelled three times previously in the past three weeks.

Two hundred metres from the high rise buildings, the SMM observed that all the windows on the second floor of a public hospital had been destroyed. On entering the hospital, the SMM observed that the entire second floor had been destroyed, with internal walls, furniture and medical equipment destroyed, with only rubble remaining. (The SMM has photographs of all material damage observed).

The SMM saw many evidently traumatised and crying civilians and medical staff. Ten patients, in their pyjamas, were outside the building. A doctor told the SMM that two civilians, who had been standing outside the building at the time of the attack, had been hit by shrapnel, one of whom, he said, had died. The SMM later went to the morgue, where they saw a body, with upper chest injuries consistent with information supplied by the doctor. According to a staff member at the morgue, the deceased man had been 38 years’ old.