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Ukraine's acting president calls for relaunch of anti-terror operation Ukraine president calls for renewed action against pro-Russian separatists
(about 2 hours later)
Ukraine's acting president has called for an anti-terrorist operation to be relaunched in the east of the country after the body of a local politician from his party was found showing what he said was signs of torture. Ukraine's acting president has called for the resumption of military operations against pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, claiming two of his party's supporters had been "tortured to death", in a further blow to an unravelling international peace plan.
Ukraine's security forces had largely suspended what was a fairly limited operation to respond to the takeover of an eastern town by pro-Russian separatists after reaching an accord with Moscow last week to try to defuse the crisis. Oleksandr Turchynov's call for action could complicate the task of European mediators. Oleksandr Turchynov said "counter-terrorist" operations in the region, suspended as part of the peace agreement in Geneva last Thursday, should restart after the bodies of two men, one a pro-Kiev politician, had been found near the rebel-held town of Slavyansk.
The acting president said in a statement on Tuesday that two "brutally tortured" bodies had been found near the city of Slavyansk, which is in the hands of pro-Russian militants. One was that of Volodymyr Rybak, a member of Turchynov's Batkivshchyna party. "The terrorists who effectively took the whole Donetsk region hostage have now gone too far, by starting to torture and murder Ukrainian patriots. These crimes are being committed with the full support and connivance of the Russian Federation," Turchynov said, hours after a joint appearance with the US vice-president, Joe Biden.
His call to relaunch operations came as anti-Kiev militia in the country's east edged a step closer towards secession from Kiev and joining Russia. A "people's assembly" in Luhansk, where heavily armed militia have been occupying the security service headquarters for more than two weeks, announced on Tuesday morning that they would hold a two-stage referendum on the region's future. The country's defence ministry also reported that one of its observation planes had been struck by gunfire from Slavyansk, one of the areas of greatest tension in the eastern region. The plane landed without injuries, the ministry added.
The armed men remain in the regional government buildings they have occupied for several weeks despite a peace deal struck in Geneva that called on pro-Russian rebels to turn in their weapons and vacate the buildings they had seized in nine cities. Turchynov's call to relaunch army operations came on a day when international monitors reported a worsening in the security situation in separatist-held eastern districts, while the US and Russia blamed each other for the continuing unrest.
Russian and western leaders have accused each other of not fulfilling their end of the bargain following a shootout in eastern Ukraine that left at least three dead this weekend. Biden flew to Kiev to offer the Ukrainian government economic support and tell Moscow it was "time to stop talking and start acting". In response, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said the onus was on Washington to rein in the authorities in Kiev, which he said had been brought to power by the US and was responsible for "outrages".
Speaking in Kiev following meetings with the western-allied leadership, the US vice-president, Joe Biden, told Russia on Tuesday that it was "time to stop talking and start acting". Western officials acknowledged that the Geneva plan – agreed on Thursday by the US, Russia, Ukraine and the EU – was clearly in trouble, but the US and the EU put off a decision on imposing new sanctions on Russian leaders, hoping diplomacy could somehow be salvaged in the new few days.
Biden met members of the parliament, Turchynov and the acting prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and warned that the country must "fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system" before pledging $50m (£30m) to help Ukraine's government to carry out political and economic reforms, including $11m to help conduct the presidential election on 25 May. "The negative rhetoric we have seen coming from Moscow is not what we expected from Russia, but we are going to give some time to this, while we make it clear to Russia there needs to be movement," a western diplomat said, adding that a further Geneva meeting to narrow differences could not be ruled out.
Biden also announced an additional $8m in non-lethal military assistance for the Ukrainian armed forces, including bomb-disposal equipment, communications gear and vehicles. On the ground, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), tasked with monitoring and helping implement the Geneva plan, reported very little progress over the weekend towards two of its main goals: disarming rival groups in eastern Ukraine or ending the occupation of public buildings by pro-Moscow militias.
In Luhansk, voting for a Ukrainian president will be preceded by a vote for independence. The first phase of the referendum, planned for 11 May, will ask voters whether the region should become an autonomous entity. A second phase, planned for 18 May, will ask whether Luhansk should be independent or join Russia. Meanwhile, the OSCE said the security in the most troubled areas was getting worse. An American journalist working for Vice News, Simon Ostrovsky, was reported to have been held by the separatists running Slavyansk, on the orders of their leader, the self-styled "People's Mayor", Vyacheslav Ponomaryov.
Pro-Russian protesters in Donetsk have also promised to hold a referendum on the region's "sovereignty" by 11 May. Amid a growing number of reports of abductions, arrests and disappearances, the head of the OSCE mission, Ertugrul Apakan, called for pro-Russian separatists to release the chief of police in the eastern town of Kramatorsk, Colonel Vitaliy Kolupai. "The OSCE monitors talked to witnesses who were able to confirm reports that armed individuals who called themselves supporters of the so-called 'Donetsk Republic' entered the premises of Kramatorsk police department and abducted its head Colonel Vitaliy Kolupai who is being kept against his will," the Vienna-based organisation said in a statement.
Ukraine's interior ministry has reportedly created a special "Timur" battalion to fight separatism in the Luhansk region. Although the unit would appear to take its name from its commander, army veteran and champion power lifter Timur Yuldashev, he said on Ukrainian television it was so named because Timur in the Uzbek language means "ironclad". The OSCE added that because of "unpredictable security risks", its observers had been unable to reach the site of a shooting on Sunday morning in another separatist-held town of Slavyansk, in which at least three people were reported dead. Moscow and its supporters in the region blamed Ukrainian rightwingers. Kiev blamed Russian military intelligence.
"I'll try to do everything so that this battalion will indeed become ironclad, so that it becomes a unit that can help fend off the threat of separatism in our Luhansk region and the breakup of our nation," Yuldashev said. The OSCE mission called the incident "a worrying deterioration of the situation" and said Slavyansk had become a no-go zone. "The security situation is assessed as deteriorating, and operating conditions for OSCE teams are marginal," it said.
So far, police in Luhansk have allowed the building occupation and rallies outside to proceed unimpeded. The anti-terrorist operation announced by Kiev last week to regain control over the east of the country has achieved little success, with some soldiers defecting to the rebel side and surrendering six infantry fighting vehicles to militia in Slavyansk. Elsewhere in the region, the 150-strong monitoring team "did not find any indications that the Geneva Statement was starting to be implemented in the Luhansk region" where pro-Moscow activists refused to move from government buildings they have been occupying for two weeks and instead announced a two-stage referendum on independence from Ukraine and union with Russia. In Donetsk, the OSCE reported that "occupation of state institutions was ongoing."
During his meeting with Biden, heavyweight boxer and Kiev mayoral candidate Vitaly Klitschko called on the US and Europe to adopt fresh sanctions against Russia that would "include all sectors of the economy and actually be painful". The US and its European partners, which have greater trade ties with Russia, have limited their sanctions to visa bans and asset freezes on Russian officials, an approach that hasn not noticeably affected the Kremlin's policy on Ukraine. Vice president Biden arrived in Kiev with offers of an extra $8m in non-lethal military assistance for the Ukrainian armed forces, including bomb-disposal equipment, communications gear and vehicles. He also pledged $50m (£30m) to help Ukraine's government to carry out political and economic reforms, including $11m to help conduct the presidential election on 25 May, but said the acting leadership must "fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system".
Klitschko also called on the US to help equip the Ukrainian military, which has reportedly suffered from shortages in manpower and supplies. Speaking in Kiev, Biden called on Russia to persuade its supporters in eastern Ukraine to disarm and to pull back troops from the Ukrainian borders.
The US has sent the USS Donald Cook to the Black Sea for war games. A US navy spokeswoman said there was no truth to Russian media reports that US and Russian military dolphins could meet in open waters, following Russia's takeover of the Ukrainian combat dolphin unit when it annexed Crimea.Also on Tuesday, Russian authorities barred Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev from all Russian territory for five years, citing a law banning foreign nationals who are accused of threatening public order. The ban on Dzhemilev, who left the peninsula for a trip to Kiev on Tuesday morning, came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, rehabilitated Crimean Tatars of political crimes they were accused of by Joseph Stalin, who deported most of the ethnic group during the second world war. "We've heard a lot from Russian officials in the past few days. But now it's time for Russia to stop talking and start acting," he told a news conference. "We will not allow this to become an open-ended process. Time is short in which to make progress."
Lavrov, however, shrugged off the US pressure, and argued that it was the US-backed government in Kiev that was destabilising the situation.
"Before putting forth ultimatums to us, demanding fulfilment of something within two-three days or otherwise be threatened with sanctions, we would urgently call on our American partners to fully recognise responsibility for those whom they brought to power and whom they are trying to shield, closing their eyes to the outrages created by this regime and by the fighters on whom this regime leans," Lavrov said.