According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by a newspaper, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.

KIEV, January 25 (Sputnik) — The Donetsk airport, which has been under fire from Ukrainian forces, is located on the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) side of the demarcation line outlined in the Minsk agreements, the Ukrainian Mirror Weekly newspaper reports.

According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by the newspaper, entitled “line of contact between the parties with reference to locality”, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.

The fact that the airport has to be given to Donetsk militia “is supported by numbers – coordinates set forth in the annex to the [Minsk] Memorandum. Perhaps this is why this document has remained unpublished until now,” the newspaper’s international politics observer wrote.

According to the newspaper’s Kiev sources, the Minsk agreements envisioned that the airport would be transferred to DPR, however, this did not happen as the militia failed to transfer a number of locations to Kiev-led forces, the source said.

A ceasefire agreement and a memorandum outlining the ceasefire’s implementation were signed in September 2014 during meetings of the trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, which comprises representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Both sides have subsequently reported numerous ceasefire violations.

The Donetsk airport has long been a hotspot for fighting between Ukrainian forces and local independence supporters. Fighting intensified last week, with Kiev officially acknowledging that a major security operation was being carried out at the airport. The renewed shelling has destroyed nearby homes and infrastructure.