Ukraine vows to use force if pro-Russian protesters don’t leave occupied buildings
Politicians in Ukraine maneuver for a deal to end standoff
(about 9 hours later)
DONETSK, Ukraine — The country’s new interior minister vowed Wednesday morning to use force against pro-Russian protesters unless they leave government buildings they have occupied in eastern Ukraine by Friday, and armored personnel carriers were spotted gathering in the city of Luhansk.
DONETSK, Ukraine — The pro-Russian militants who have put this country on the brink by seizing buildings and declaring independent republics in the east appeared to be ready to soften their tactics Wednesday, and politicians saw an opportunity to promote a deal.
Politicians in the region who were associated with the previous, ousted government scrambled to find a resolution. They voiced sympathy for the protesters but made it clear they do not favor a breakup of Ukraine or a protracted occupation of government property.
A new regional poll showed very limited support for the building occupations, and even pro-Russian party leaders began to suggest that the agitators should call it a day.
“Those who have occupied buildings, especially those with weapons, pose a danger to everyone in Donbass,” said Nikolai Levchenko, a leading member of the Party of Regions here in Donetsk, the center of the Donbass region. Donetsk has been a stronghold of the party, formerly led by Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed as president in February.
Negotiations were taking place here in the city of Donetsk, and the governor said he was hopeful that an agreement that included an amnesty for the protesters would be reached by as early as Thursday.
Without the support of the party that has most strongly favored good relations with Moscow, the several hundred separatist protesters occupying buildings here and in Luhansk are left with little public backing.
But a deal could still go wrong. The separatists are part of a ragged, murky and disjointed movement, without identifiable leaders, and the politicians on the other side, from various parties, are sure to be looking for personal advantage.
In Luhansk, 56 people left the occupied headquarters of the security police Wednesday morning, a day after the government claimed there were about 60 hostages inside. The release followed a visit by Serhiy Tihipko, until recently with the Party of Regions, to try to find a resolution. He said there were no hostages, and it was not immediately clear who the 56 people were.
The authorities in Kiev, echoed by officials in Washington, accuse Russia of trying to stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine as a prelude to a Crimea-style invasion, and Moscow’s unspecified intentions loom over everything. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Ukraine’s ever-mounting debt to Russia now totals $16 billion.
Levchenko called on the pro-Russian agitators to vacate the buildings they have seized and allow the government to get back to work. “If I feel people are in danger, I will be with them,” he said, referring to the threat of an armed attack by forces loyal to Kiev, but he suggested that that could be avoided if the protesters go home.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who spoke by phone with Secretary of State John F. Kerry, said Moscow is willing to sit down with representatives of the United States, the European Union and Ukraine to discuss the crisis, according to a ministry statement.
An obstacle to a definitive resolution to the crisis, he said, is that there is no single point of view. People on the square in front of the administrative building advocate a range of solutions from Russian annexation to independence to decentralization of the Ukrainian system. Nothing, he suggested, can make everyone happy.
Here in the east, the tension diminished. In the city of Luhansk on Wednesday morning, 56 people who police said had been held hostage by militants occupying the state security agency’s regional headquarters were released.
Andrei Shishatsky, the former governor who was fired after Yanukovych fled the country in February, said firmly at a news conference here, “Donbass will be part of a unified, independent Ukraine.”
In Donetsk, protesters were in discussions about freeing up at least part of the occupied 11-story administration building so that the regional council could get back to work.
In Kiev, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said, “There are two options — political negotiations, and force,” Reuters news agency reported. “For those who want dialogue, we propose talks and a political solution. For the minority who want conflict, they will get a forceful answer from the Ukrainian authorities.”
This may be partly attributable to pressure from Kiev, where Interior Minister Arsen Avakov vowed Wednesday morning to use force against the protesters if no deals are reached by Friday. Armored personnel carriers were spotted gathering in Luhansk.
Authorities in Kiev insist that Russia is looking for a pretext to invade and that Moscow is stirring up trouble to create one. American officials have expressed the same fears.
But a political operative here in Donetsk, Oleksandr Yaroshenko, who has worked with the parties now in power in Kiev, worried that the politicians there may be finding it useful to have a continuing emergency on their hands — and that this could mean a postponing of the May 25 presidential election.
The Russian Foreign Ministry denied any such intention in a statement posted Wednesday.
That, he said, could prevent a truce from being reached.
“The U.S. and Ukraine have no reasons for concerns,” it said. “Russia has said many times that it is not conducting any unusual or unplanned activities significant in terms of military issues on its territory in the area of the Ukrainian border.”
Little public support
But Russian troops remain near the border conducting exercises, and Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Tuesday echoed the Ukrainian allegation that Russians are fomenting trouble.
On the other side of the fence, a leading member of the Party of Regions, which was ousted from power in February, called on the protesters in Donetsk to go home.
“It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalyst behind the chaos of the last 24 hours,” Kerry said in testimony before a Senate committee. He said the unrest “could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea” and warned of harsh new sanctions if Russia invades.
“Those who have occupied buildings, especially those with weapons, pose a danger to everyone in Donbass,” said Nikolai Levchenko, who until recently had been seen as one of the most pro-Russian officeholders here in Donetsk, the center of the Donbass region.
Right-wing Russian nationalist groups have been seeking volunteers through social media to go to Ukraine, but it is not clear whether those appeals have borne fruit.
A local journalist, Yekaterina Zhemchuzhnikova, said Levchenko and his coal-baron patron, Rinat Akhmetov, are most likely trying to make themselves look like heroes and wangle concessions out of Kiev in the process. “It’s a really good card for them to play,” she said.
Pro-Russia protesters in three eastern Ukrainian cities simultaneously attacked government buildings Sunday night. In Kharkiv, they were ousted by police early Tuesday. But in Donetsk and in Luhansk, the separatists have held tight. They have declared a “people’s republic” but have made it clear that they favor Crimean-style annexation by Russia.
But they might simply be reacting to public opinion. A poll released Wednesday found that just 26.5 percent of Donetsk residents surveyed support the pro-Russian rallies and that only 4.7 percent want the region to break off from Ukraine, one of the main demands of the protesters. The survey was conducted March 26 to 29 by the Donetsk Institute of Social Research and Political Analysis.
Levchenko said Wednesday that some of the protesters are indeed seeking help from what he sarcastically termed a “neighboring, fraternal country.” But, he said, “we have to solve our problems ourselves, without the interference of any foreign countries, including countries in Europe and the United States.”
A poll conducted by the Gallup organization on behalf of the International Republican Institute and released Saturday found that just 4 percent of respondents want the region to break away.
The main issue here is economic recovery — and that is what the government should be focused on, he said.
But Levchenko noted Wednesday that even among supporters of the protests, there is a diversity of opinions about ultimate goals and no single person to speak for the separatists.
More than a dozen passengers on a flight from Moscow were pulled aside at passport control Tuesday, as Ukraine attempts to bar those it suspects of causing trouble.
“We don’t have a leader,” said Kirill Cherkashin, a professor of political science who is pro-Russia, “but we have a very clear idea.” That, he said, is a demand for a referendum on the status of Donbass. He said a “civilized” resolution to the Ukrainian crisis is possible but unlikely.
As evening fell and people got off work, the crowd outside the occupied regional administration building in the city swelled to a few thousand. Barricades of tires, automobile bumpers, barbed wire and sandbags rose along the perimeter of the 11-story late-Soviet slab of a building.
“I can’t believe in the authorities in Kiev,” Cherkashin said.
The police presence appeared extremely light, and those officers who were at the site, in regular uniforms, made no effort to restrict access. Women on the plaza in front of the building merrily chanted, “Together we’re here to the end” and “Donetsk is a Russian city.”
But the Kiev government does not believe that many of the protesters are who they say they are and consider them agents or friends of Moscow. And that view has support elsewhere.
A group broke into song, belting out a World War II favorite about Katyusha rockets.
“There is ample evidence, both in traditional and social media and elsewhere, that some of the protesters are being paid, that they’re not locals, and that is certainly of concern to us,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said Wednesday.
But a block away, traffic moved as usual. This is not a city in the grip of secession fever — or anti-secession fever. On a warm spring afternoon, the playgrounds were full of children, couples strolled, shoppers shopped. Politics stops about 100 yards from the center of the action.
Kerry-Lavrov talks
And, yet, the fate of the country hangs in the balance.
In his conversation with Kerry, Lavrov said Russia was willing to discuss the situation with the United States, the E.U. and Ukraine as long as the Kiev government takes all of Ukraine’s regions into consideration. Russia has complained that Kiev has been acting against the interests of the Russian-speaking east.
Donetsk, about 50 miles west of the Russian border, has strong ties, economic and otherwise, to Russia, and distaste for the new government in Kiev runs strong here. But support for secession appears to be thin among the city’s 1 million residents.
“The Russian side once again stressed that there is no alternative to the involvement of all the regions in the process of constitutional reform,” the Foreign Ministry said.
On Monday evening, one of Ukraine’s richest men, the coal baron Rinat Akhmetov, met with protesters and, although expressing sympathy and support, urged them to talk with the Kiev government. He strongly denies allegations surfacing in the Ukrainian news media that he has helped finance the pro-Russia demonstrations.
In a second phone call Wednesday, Kerry and Lavrov discussed “the importance of resolving the security situation in key cities in Eastern Ukraine peacefully and through dialogue” and rejected the use of force, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
Yet it’s difficult to know, as the two sides become more polarized, how the crisis might play out.
In his earlier conversation, Lavrov also accepted Kerry’s assurances that there was no evidence that Greystone, a private U.S. security firm, was operating in Ukraine. Russian officials had asserted that Greystone, a subsidiary to a successor of the Blackwater security company, had been hired to operate in Ukraine.
Protesters were cleared overnight from the regional administration building in Kharkiv, said Avakov, the interior minister.
In a statement, Greystone said it “does not currently, nor do we have any plans to, send personnel to the Ukraine.”
“The Kharkiv night was infinitely long,” Avakov wrote on Facebook. He said protesters threw stun grenades at National Guard soldiers and set a fire in the building’s lobby. Firefighters put out the blaze.
Kathy Lally in Moscow contributed to this report.
The West has been warning Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula last month, against any incursion into eastern Ukraine. “If Russia were to intervene further in Ukraine, it would be a historic mistake,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters Tuesday in Paris. “It would have grave consequences for our relationship with Russia and would further isolate Russia internationally.”
Russia blames U.S.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that the United States, not Russia, is responsible for sowing discord in Ukraine. “Our American partners are trying to assess the situation,” Lavrov told reporters, “applying their habits to others.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry charged that ultranationalists from Ukraine’s Right Sector movement and American mercenaries were among the police force Kiev sent to eastern Ukraine to quell the violence.
“We are particularly concerned that the operation involves some 150 American mercenaries from a private company Greystone Ltd., dressed in the uniform of the [Ukrainian] special task police unit Sokol,” the ministry said in a statement posted on its Web site Tuesday morning. It called for an immediate halt to “all military preparations which could lead to a civil war.”
Ukrainian officials denied that any mercenaries or irregular forces are at work in eastern Ukraine.
“There is no Right Sector, let alone U.S. security forces, in Kharkiv, Donetsk or Luhansk,” Serhiy Pashynsky, chief of the presidential administration in Kiev, said Tuesday. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a similar denial.
Earlier reports in Russian news media identified Greystone as a subsidiary of the private security firm once known as Blackwater and later renamed Academi.
Two weeks ago, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency quoted Ukrainian government security sources as saying that they intended to hire private military personnel from Greystone “to suppress” the eastern, Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine. In early March, Russian state television reported that several hundred armed Greystone employees had flown into the Kiev airport.
A woman who answered the phone at Greystone’s offices in Chesapeake, Va., declined to comment Tuesday. She identified herself only as “an employee of Greystone.”
In Washington, a senior Pentagon official told a House committee Tuesday that the United States is extending the stay of the destroyer USS Truxtun in the Black Sea and will send another ship there in a week. The Truxtun was dispatched last month to conduct training with the Romanian and Bulgarian navies, a mission scheduled before the Ukraine crisis erupted.
William Branigin and Christian Davenport in Washington contributed to this report.
