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Pro-Russian Demonstrators in Eastern Ukraine Urged to Stand Down In Eastern Ukraine, a One-Building, Pro-Russia Realm Persists Despite Criticism
(about 11 hours later)
DONETSK, Ukraine — Facing threats of forcible eviction by the Ukrainian government, pro-Russian demonstrators who have seized the 11-story government headquarters in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s second-biggest city, suffered a further blow Wednesday when local political barons who share their deep dislike of Ukraine’s new government demanded that they give up and hand over any weapons. DONETSK, Ukraine — Nikolai Solntsev, the self-declared commissar of the Eastern Front and a founding father of the newly proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, has been waiting 22 years, three months and 14 days for this moment.
The protesters, however, vowed to stand firm, fortifying barricades erected around the Donetsk regional administration building as a thinning crowd of several hundred supporters chanted “Russia, Russia” and cheered calls for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to protect them. That is the time the former submariner in the Soviet Navy has had to endure since the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving him without a country he felt at home in and could serve with pride.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said at a news conference that demonstrators who have seized buildings in Donetsk and at least two other eastern cities had two options — “political negotiations and force.” He said the crisis would be resolved one way or the other within 48 hours. “The Soviet Union does not exist, but my oath of service remains. I never took an oath to Ukraine,” Mr. Solntsev said, explaining why he feels no loyalty to the country where he lives but is ready to serve an imaginary new nation that nobody, not even Russia, recognizes. The Donetsk People’s Republic has no authority outside an 11-story Ukrainian government building that an unruly Russian-speaking, club-bearing crowd has occupied since Sunday. It also has no electricity: The authorities cut that off as soon as the People’s Republic declared its existence.
Interior Ministry troops have already expelled protesters from a government block in Kharkiv, an industrial city north of Donetsk, while a standoff at the headquarters of the state security service in nearby Luhansk ended peacefully Wednesday, when several dozen people left the building of their own accord. The authorities had claimed earlier that 60 people had been taken hostage inside, but this was not the case, according to local journalists. It is a quixotic and, to many here, crackpot project, but one that feeds on a deep pool of resentment and fear that extends beyond the few hundred people now holed up in the government building.
The main challenge now to the government in Kiev, which took power after President Viktor F. Yanukovych fled in February, is Donetsk, his Russian-speaking hometown and long a bastion of pro-Russia sentiment. Nobody really expects the People’s Republic, a revival of the short-lived Donetsk Republic set up amid the chaos that followed Russia’s 1917 Communist revolution, to last more than a few days.
“We will stand to the end,” a protest leader assured a crowd outside the occupied regional administration building, which has become the headquarters of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a nominally independent but universally unrecognized state declared on Monday, and now flies the Russian instead of Ukrainian flag. “Victory will be ours. Russia is with us.” But the rifts rooted in language, culture, politics and economics that created it — and that have dogged Ukraine since its independence in 1991 — show little sign of fading. Nor do the tensions created by the struggle in Donetsk, about 45 miles from the border with Russia. Late on Wednesday, a group of protesters blocked the exit of a Ukrainian military site here and forced buses carrying troops to go back inside.
A daylong series of defiant speeches was punctuated by jittery warnings of an imminent attack and pleas for Donetsk residents to bring bags of sugar, gasoline and other provisions to the protesters. What began as a single ring of barricades made of tires, barbed wire and bags of sand and rocks expanded Wednesday to include a second set of fortifications. Mr. Solntsev acknowledged that the People’s Republic, declared on Monday, faced an uphill struggle. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian government vowed to end the occupation of the government building within 48 hours, either through negotiation or force. Even officials in the Party of Regions, the former ruling party of ousted President Viktor F. Yanukovych, denounced the seizure of official premises and called on the protesters to end their occupation and accept that Donetsk is part of Ukraine.
But there was little sign that the protesters — whom Kiev condemns as reckless separatists controlled and financed by Russia, along with die-hard supporters of Mr. Yanukovych — had expanded their support beyond a narrow fringe of fervently pro-Russian political activists and a core base of impoverished pensioners, jobless coal miners and other angry victims of Ukraine’s dysfunctional economy. The cluster of fringe pro-Russian political outfits behind the Donetsk People’s Republic, which the authorities in Kiev denounce as a local power grab instigated by Moscow, disagree on their final goal. They cannot decide whether to push to join Russia, to give substance to their chimerical state or to secure more autonomy for the region within Ukraine.
Even the Party of Regions, Mr. Yanukovych’s former governing party, declined to support the pro-Russian protest movement and its demands for a referendum on the status of the east, a move that could pave the way for secession, as happened in Crimea, which Russia annexed last month. Instead, local party barons held a news conference to denounce the seizure of official buildings and to call on protesters to quickly end their occupation and accept that Donetsk is part of Ukraine. But the People’s Republic does now have a 12-member governing council, which meets on the 11th floor, Mr. Solntsev said. That space was previously occupied by Donetsk’s Kiev-appointed governor, the billionaire metals magnate Sergei A. Taruta, who now holds his meetings in a local hotel.
“These people pose a bigger and bigger threat to the majority of the population,” said Nikolai Levchenko, head of the Donetsk branch of the Party of Regions and a member of Parliament in Kiev. He said he sympathized with some of the protesters’ concerns, particularly their distress with a new government dominated by Ukrainian speakers from the west, but pleaded with them to leave occupied buildings and pursue their objectives through legal means. With the power cut off in the occupied government block, the elevators no longer work, requiring the portly Mr. Solntsev and his comrades — who include two newly appointed ministers, one for foreign affairs and one for security — to climb the stairs past masked men armed with metal rods and wooden clubs. Mr. Solntsev said he could not remember either minister’s name.
Mr. Levchenko blamed the rash of occupations on the example set by pro-European demonstrators who seized buildings in Kiev and western Ukraine during their three-month-long campaign to topple Mr. Yanukovych. Protesters in Donetsk, he said, “have become moral hostages to all the things that happened in the west of Ukraine and in Kiev.” Far more important, he said, than the conventional trappings of statehood — details like territory, laws and functioning services — is “the idea” of a country that “speaks for the people.” In the case of Donetsk, Mr. Solntsev said, this means for Russian speakers, who he said felt like unwanted aliens in a nation that has been dominated by Ukrainian speakers from the west since the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych, a Donetsk native, in February.
Andrei Shishatsky, another erstwhile ally of Mr. Yanukovych who was removed as governor of Donetsk after the February revolution in Kiev, also urged protesters occupying his former office block to “leave quickly,” and emphasized that the region must remain “part of a unified and independent Ukraine.” While only 4.7 percent of local residents want a separate Donetsk state, just over a third like to identify themselves as “citizens of Ukraine.” More prefer “Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine” or “residents of the Donets Basin,” according to a survey released Wednesday by the Donetsk Institute for Social Research and Political Analysis.
Igor Koval, the acting chairman of the Donetsk regional council, complained that the protesters occupying the administration building had made it impossible for him to do any work because they would not let him into the council chamber on the 10th floor. They should leave, Mr. Koval said. But he added that he understood and shared their anger at “being treated like second-class citizens” by a national government that “does not listen to or understand the problems of the east.”
The government installed after Mr. Yanukovych fled the capital on Feb. 21 ended the dominance of Russian-speaking politicians from the east of the country — most of whom had opposed the pro-European protests in Kiev that toppled Mr. Yanukovych — and shifted power sharply to Ukrainian speakers from western and central regions.
State-run Russian television, which is widely watched here despite efforts by officials in Kiev to block access, has fanned fears that this shift will bring discrimination and even persecution by nationalist extremists. The Ukrainian Parliament contributed to this anxiety by voting in late February to scrap a law that allows Russian to be used instead of Ukrainian in schools, courts and elsewhere in regions where it is widely spoken. The decision was quickly reversed but left fertile grounds for pro-Russian activists to plant seeds of alarm.
Few Donetsk residents can cite concrete examples of how life has become worse as a result of the change of power in Kiev, but opinion polls show that the eastern regions take a dim view of Ukraine’s new order. A recent poll commissioned by the International Republican Institute showed that 72 percent of people in the Russian-speaking east think the country is going in the wrong direction, compared with only 36 percent in the Ukrainian-speaking west.
East and west are also sharply divided on where their future should lie. Ninety percent of those polled in the west want Ukraine to enter an economic union with Europe, while 59 percent of easterners want to join a Russian-led customs union.
Mr. Solntsev said the People’s Republic had not had time to work out its own economic policy but would focus on supporting “the working class, not the bourgeoisie.”
The lack of a firm policy means that while Mr. Solntsev and his allies have been able to mimic the tactics of the pro-European protesters in Kiev by building barricades, tearing up paving stones and setting up self-defense units, they have failed to rally widespread public support, particularly from the middle class.
Dmitri Zhukov, the owner of a restaurant near the seized government building, watched in disgust as a group of young men with clubs marched by to join the occupation. “How can we support these people?” he asked. “They think uncle Putin will come and give them money. They need to stop drinking and start working.”