DONETSK, April 22. /TASS/. Deployment of NATO inspectors from Canada, Denmark and Norway to the contact line in Donbass has entailed deterioration of the situation in the region, Eduard Basurin, a spokesman for the operations command of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), said on Sunday.

"According to our information, a team of foreign inspectors who arrived in the conflict zone in Donbass on April 15 is a key cause of the deterioration of the situation at the contact line," the Donetsk News Agency quoted him as saying.

According to Basurin, aggravation is observed exactly at those contact line sections where inspectors are deployed. Thus, they were deployed near the city of Gorlovka on April 17 and the city, as well as neighboring villages of Zaitsevo and Shirokaya Balka came under shelling on the same day. On April 20, when the inspectors stayed in the south of Donbass, the villages of Sakhanka and Leninskoye came under massive shelling.

As of now, he said, evidence is being collected to prove NATO’s involvement in military crimes committed by the Ukrainian army. Relevant materials will be referred to DPR courts and later to international tribunals, he added.

On April 18, Gorlovka’s acting head of administration Ivan Prikhodko reported that a civilian had been killed in the settlement of Zaitsevo in Gorlovka’s northern suburb as a results of shelling by Ukrainian troops. The DPR’s mission to the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) said that one civilian had been wounded near Dokuchayevsk. Five houses and an electrical substation were damaged in shelling by Ukrainian troops in the past day alone.

On the initiative of the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, the so-called Easter ceasefire came into effect in the Donbass area from March 30. However, as was the case with the previous ceasefire, the shelling attacks did not fully stop and the sides accused each other of truce violations already in the morning of March 30.