Ukraine's military said two of its soldiers were killed and two wounded in the country's eastern Donbas region.

In a statement on January 26, the military said one soldier was killed and another wounded by gunfire, while in a separate incident another soldier was killed and another wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED).

The statement did not disclose the soldiers’ identities or where exactly the incidents occurred.

Eleven Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this month so far, exceeding the number of killed in December by two.

The military said it reported 12 cease-fire violations by Russia-backed separatists on January 26, while it reported 10 violations the day before.

Earlier on January 26, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said separatists had shelled Ukrainian government positions in Orikhov and Novotoshkivskiy in the Luhansk region and Krasnogorivka and Lebedynskiy in the Donetsk region.

The conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists that started in April 2014 has killed more than 13,000 people.

Hostilities erupted there shortly after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move that has not been recognized by the international community.

Some 130 Ukrainian military personnel were killed in 2019 and the beginning of January, the Prosecutor-General’s Office said on January 17. In the Donetsk region, 101 service personnel were killed, while 31 died in the Luhansk region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to end the war, which has internally uprooted 1.5 million people from their homes and caused a humanitarian crisis in the east.

Since ascending to the presidency in May, Zelenskiy has implemented measures with Russia to deescalate, including two prisoner exchanges and the mutual withdrawal of forces and weapons from three flash points along the 400-kilometer front line.

The Kremlin officially denies that it is a party to the war and describes the events in the Donbas as "an internal Ukrainian conflict."

With reporting by Hromadske International

