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Tuesday Sep 24, 2024
Monday, 5 May 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
A couple of hundred pro-Russian protesters in the eastern city of Donetsk stormed the Governor’s business premises and the state security headquarters, ransacking files and smashing windows. The attack reflected growing disorder in the area, targeting as it did a security building that had already been brought under rebel control.
“This is for yesterday!” said Tatiana Kamniva outside the Governor’s office. “They’re monsters, worse than monsters.”
The Odessa clashes spread the violence from the eastern separatist heartland to an area far from the Russian frontier, raising the prospect of unrest sweeping more broadly across a country of around 45 million people the size of France.
The Kremlin, which has massed tens of thousands of soldiers on Ukraine’s eastern border and proclaims the right to invade to protect Russian speakers, said the Government in Kiev and its Western backers were responsible for the deaths.
Kiev said the violence was provoked by foreign demonstrators sent in from Transdniestria, a nearby breakaway pro-Russian region of Moldova where Moscow has a military garrison. It said most of the dead who had been identified so far were from there.
On Saturday morning, people placed flowers near the burnt-out doors of the trade union building, lighting candles and putting up the yellow, white and red flag of the city. About 2,000 pro-Russian protesters outside the burnt-out building chanted “Odessa is a Russian city”.
Events took a violent turn on Friday when a column of soccer supporters, chanting support for Ukraine’s leaders, clashed with men in black, some firing pistols. Television pictures showed police caught between the two sides.
Clashes then spread along the streets until rebels moved into a large trade union building. Petrol bombs were thrown and shots were heard though the exact sequence and detail of events remained unclear on Saturday.
Oleg Konstantinov, a journalist covering the events for a local Internet site, said bullets had flown in the melee before the blaze: “I was hit in the arm, then I started crawling, and then got hit in the back and leg.”
The Odessa bloodshed came on the same day that Kiev launched its biggest push yet to reassert its control over separatist areas in the east, hundreds of kilometres away, where armed pro-Russian rebels have proclaimed a “People’s Republic of Donetsk”.
The rebels there, aim to hold a referendum on 11 May on secession from Ukraine, similar to one staged in March in Ukraine’s Crimea region, which was seized and annexed by Russia in a move that overturned the post-Cold War diplomatic order.
On Saturday the Government said it was pressing on with the offensive in the area for a second day, and had recaptured a television tower and a security services building from rebels in Kramatorsk, a town near the rebel stronghold of Slaviansk. Health authorities said six people were killed in fighting.
The military operation in the east was overshadowed by the unprecedented violence in Odessa, a vibrant multi-ethnic port city that has seen some support for separatists but nothing like the riots that erupted on Friday.
Police said four people were killed, at least three shot dead, and dozens wounded in running battles between people backing Kiev and pro-Russian activists. The clashes ended with separatists holed up in the trade union building.
At least 37 people died in the blaze. On Saturday, police raised the death toll in the city to 42, easily the biggest toll since about 100 people were killed in Kiev protests that toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich in February.
