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Following a shelling of the Donbass city of Gorlovka on Wednesday that left one firefighter dead, Ukrainian forces are being accused of war crimes but it remains unknown whether the fire station in the city’s Nikitrovsky district was intentionally targeted in the attack on civilian areas.  

Two fire engines were destroyed during the shelling which comes a week after local authorities claimed that at least nine medical facilities, among them a hospital, were damaged by Ukrainian shelling, and Ukraine insisted that the hospital in the city of Makeevka was hit by blasts after a nearby ammunition dump was destroyed.  

However, health authorities and local residents dismissed that claim. 

Targeting civilians and emergency services constitutes a war crime, locals believe that attacks like this on Donbass are neglected but when similar incidents in Ukraine take place, they make it to the front page news in the West. 

Read next: The ICC's Legal Acrobatics: from Darfur to Donbass

Officials from the Donetsk People’s Republic state that at least 56 attacks took place in eight towns and cities across the region within a 24-hour period, in which western-supplied artillery and grad rockets were allegedly used.  

Ironically, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been thriving to get his hands on cluster munitions, and the US just agreed to provide them to Ukraine last week in a surprising announcement after the Pentagon itself believed the matter was controversial to agree to. 

Cluster bombs are prohibited under the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international convention that, through a categorical prohibition and a framework for action, tackles the humanitarian repercussions and unacceptable harm inflicted on civilians by cluster munitions.

Just hours before, humanitarian organizations condemned the initial plans to supply the cluster munitions after citing the long-lasting threat posed by them since they leave behind unexploded bomblets.

Earlier this week, former Pentagon analyst and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski, has criticized the US decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, stating that the Pentagon is eager to unload them due to their ban in many countries. Kwiatkowski believes that the Pentagon's interest lies in clearing old inventory to make way for more profitable weapons.

It is noteworthy that on September 30 last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, following referenda that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.