Musa Magomedov, the director of the Avdiivka Coking Plant, said power had not been restored in the town, where an estimated 16,000 people live, as of early evening, although his factory was trying to generate extra heat and electricity to make up for shortfalls.
“There has been no shelling this bad since the ceasefire was signed in 2015,” he told the Telegraph, adding that one of the factory's female staff was killed when a shell landed near her home on Thursday night.
The Avdiivka coking plant is the largest in Europe, employs 4000 people, and has operated throughout the war despite losing 10 staff members to shelling
“We will keep the factory operating as long as humanely possible and we are doing our best to generate electricity and heat for the town, but without extra capacity and fuel we are struggling,” he said by telephone.
“We have received a lot of help from volunteers, but if the war continues those efforts will mean nothing. I don’t want this town to become another Homs or Aleppo,” he added.
Ukrainian servicemen give free food to local residents at the humanitarian aid center in Avdiivka
The war in eastern Ukraine has been locked in an uneasy deadlock since Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, negotiated a ceasefire deal in February 2015.
The two men have blamed one another for the current escalation in violence.
Mr Poroshenko said Russia and the separatists forces it supports were “fully responsible” for the deteriorating situation and the deaths of soldiers and civilians.
“I stress that it is completely wrong to say that Russia does not support the militants – every unit has Russian military personnel who perform orders of the Russian Federation,” he said in a statement on Friday.
The Kremlin laid blame for the escalation of “aggressive” Ukrainian actions and expressed hope that the separatist forces had “enough ammunition” to respond.
"The main thing is to persuade Kiev to drop such reckless actions which are capable of undermining the Minsk peace process," said Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Mr Putin.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told Jean-Marc Ayrault, his French counterpart, that the fighting could nullify the stalled Minsk peace-process, Russia's foreign ministry said on Friday.
Vladimir Putin, French president Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko at peace talks in Minsk in February 2015
Earlier the Russian foreign ministry accused Ukraine of “breaking the Geneva convention.”
The comments followed a heated exchanges at the United Nations Security Council in which Russia said Britain should “clean its conscience” by “giving back” the Falklands and Gibraltar before it passes judgment on the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea.
“I would like to advise: give back the Malvinas [Falkland] Islands, give back Gibraltar, return the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which you turned into a huge military base. Then perhaps your conscience will be a little cleaner and you can hold forth on other topics,” Vitaly Churkin said at the meeting on Thursday evening.
Matthew Rycroft, the British ambassador to the UN, had said Russia’s attempts to blame the Ukrainian government for the crisis were “an inversion of reality.”
Nikki Haley, who was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations by Donald Trump last month, warned the violence could scupper the new administration’s wish to improve ties with Russia.
In a strongly worded statement, she condemned Russia's "aggressive actions" in eastern Ukraine and said U.S. sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea will remain until the peninsula is returned to Ukraine.
