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Militants Defy Deadline Set by Ukraine to Stop Occupying Sites Ukraine Asks U.N. for Peacekeeping Troops as Militants Defy Deadline
(about 4 hours later)
SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — A deadline set by the Ukrainian government for pro-Russian militants in the country’s east to vacate occupied buildings passed on Monday without signs of an effort to enforce it. SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — In a new sign of desperation, Ukraine’s acting president asked the United Nations on Monday to send peacekeeping troops to the east of the country, where pro-Russia militias have seized government buildings and blocked major highways with seeming impunity.
Commandos who engaged in gunfights with men who had set up roadblocks stormed a Ukrainian police station in the city of Slovyansk on Sunday, but there were no signs after the deadline passed at 9 a.m. Monday that they had tried to approach again. A deadline set by the Ukrainian government for the militants to vacate occupied buildings passed earlier Monday without any signs of an effort to enforce it, while militants, in an apparently coordinated strategy, used the day to seize another police station in an eastern town, then hoist a Russian flag over the building.
Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine on Monday, a pro-Russian mob broke into a police station in the city of Horlivka, near the Russian border, The Associated Press reported. Rather than enforce the ultimatum, the acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, reiterated offers of concessions to grant more local autonomy in the east, on a day of wavering between the limited military and political options available to the new and still wobbly government in Kiev.
Dozens of men hurled rocks and smashed the windows of the building as onlookers cheered, the news agency reported. The group raised a Russian flag after gaining control of the station, the report said. Mr. Turchynov’s request for peacekeeping forces from the United Nations, made in a telephone call to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, reflected those limited options. There was almost no possibility that such a force could be deployed quickly — if it could be deployed at all — because it requires approval from the Security Council, where Russia, as a permanent member, wields a veto.
At least one officer was killed in the fighting on Sunday, Ukrainian officials said, and several officers and local residents were injured. The Russian news media and local residents disputed that account, however, saying that the Ukrainian forces had been engaged in a gunfight at the checkpoint only briefly. Conceding the eastern cities would weaken Kiev’s negotiating position at four-way talks planned with Russia, the European Union and pro-Russia figures in Ukrainian politics later this week, as Russia would arrive at the negotiations with one of its stated goals, autonomous authority in eastern cities, already achieved.
The central government in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, has threatened to use force in a bid to restore its authority in the eastern part of the country, a course of action that the Russian government has repeatedly warned against and that it discouraged again on Sunday. According to his presidential website, Mr. Turchynov told Mr. Ban that Russia intended to annex eastern regions, as it did the Crimean Peninsula, though Russia denies intentions to do so.
With tens of thousands of Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s eastern border near Donetsk, Western leaders have worried that Moscow might use unrest in the country’s mainly Russian-speaking areas as a pretext for invasion — even though the violence was initiated by pro-Russian forces. “The Russian Federation sends special units to the east of our country that conduct armed seizure of the administrative buildings and threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of our citizens,” Mr. Turchynov told the secretary, according to his website. The danger of bloodshed is greater than in Crimea, he suggested. The east differs from Crimea because “the majority of people do not want to support separatists.”
At an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council on Sunday evening, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, warned that the new government in Kiev intended to use military force against protesters in the east of the country. Ukraine has accused gunmen of terrorizing the population in the east. Mr. Turchynov suggested that what he called an antiterrorist operation could be conducted jointly with peacekeeping troops. “We do not object and even welcome holding joint counterterrorist operations in the east,” he said. “Then, experts and observers will be able to witness the legality of our actions themselves.” The site mentioned nothing of a timeline for organizing such a force, while control here is slipping from Kiev day by day, and had no indication of the secretary general’s response.
The country’s interim president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, issued the ultimatum Sunday, saying that separatists should vacate occupied buildings by Monday morning or face a “large-scale antiterrorist operation” that would involve the Ukrainian military. Ukraine backed away from a previous deadline of Friday after it offered, as a concession, to hold a referendum on regional autonomy and on guaranteeing the status of Russian as an official language. Mr. Ban’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, later confirmed that Mr. Ban and Mr. Turchynov had spoken by phone. He said nothing about a Ukrainian request for peacekeeping troops but he told reporters at the United Nations that Mr. Ban had expressed “great concern over the ongoing disturbances and notably the reports of civilians being armed and activity by armed groups on both sides.”
Sergei A. Taruta, the governor of the Donetsk region, said on Monday that a “special operations regime” had begun in the province, but offered no details of how the military or police were involved, Interfax, a Russian news agency, reported. In the Donetsk region, the flagrant defiance of the central government continued unchecked by the ultimatum and the warnings that military force would be used.
The city of Slovyansk was among several centers in the eastern region of Donetsk that were seized Saturday in coordinated raids that the Ukrainian authorities denounced as Russian “aggression.” On one street leading into the town on Monday, women stood in front of a barricade holding religious icons. The Ukrainian police and military forces did not appear to be present. At a roadblock outside Slovyansk, a man wearing a pilfered Ukrainian police uniform and a ski mask directed traffic. Men piled yet more tires on barricades, but otherwise seemed hardly on edge about an imminent attack. In one change, however, local residents said several dozen armed men who they believed might be Russians, rather than pro-Russia local militiamen, departed the city on Monday before dawn.
Through Monday morning, as the sun burned off a dense mist rising from stubbly winter fields in the region, the Ukrainian news media reported no efforts to storm occupied buildings in the eastern part of the country. No police officers or military personnel were gathered outside the regional administration building in Donetsk, which flies a Russian flag as well as the flag of the recently declared but as yet unrecognized People’s Republic of Donetsk. And defying the Ukrainian government’s warnings, a group of demonstrators seized a police building in Horlivka, a town northeast of Donetsk near the Russian border. Dozens of men hurled rocks and smashed the windows of the building as onlookers cheered, witnesses said.
In another indication of the scale of the loss of control by the central government, pro-Russian protesters set up a checkpoint on a main highway about 25 miles outside of Donetsk. Pro-Russia demonstrators have now occupied administrative buildings or police stations in nine towns. They build barricades and seize and disburse police weapons to the crowds, creating scenes of mayhem that could themselves become justification for Russian intervention, regardless of how the Ukrainian government reacts.
The government’s push on Sunday to reassert its authority in a vital industrial and coal-mining region appeared to have made little headway. Pro-Russian protesters appeared to control not only the police station but also the entire town of Slovyansk, after having set up checkpoints at major streets leading into town. The spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the Russian Information Agency on Monday that Mr. Putin had received many requests from residents of eastern Ukraine asking him to intervene to restore order.
The protesters blocked a major highway in the east, and Russian and Donetsk flags flew over administrative buildings in several other midsize towns, including Mariupol, where protesters seized a building Sunday. “Unfortunately, we receive many such requests from eastern Ukrainian regions, addressed personally to Putin and asking for help to get involved in one form or another,” Mr. Peskov said. “The president of Russia is watching events in these regions and is deeply worried.”
Roman Svitan, a security adviser to the Ukrainian authorities in Donetsk, said the operation on Sunday was carried out by Alfa, a unit of Ukraine’s state security service. He gave an upbeat assessment of its progress, saying Ukrainian forces had evicted gunmen from the Slovyansk Police Headquarters, though protesters there said nothing of the sort had happened. At the United Nations on Sunday, where the Security Council was convened in an emergency session, the American ambassador, Samantha Power, drew detailed parallels between the actions in the east of Ukraine and in Crimea. The military uniforms and rifles of the pro-Russia militants, she said, resembled those of the Russian soldiers deployed on the Crimean Peninsula, and thinly disguised as local residents.
Mr. Svitan said that most of the expelled gunmen were local pro-Russian extremists, but that they also included Russian operatives. Ms. Power also presented another argument discounting a grass-roots emergence of the eastern Ukrainian militias: The cities they seized were strategically situated on highways separating eastern provinces from Kiev, the capital.
Residents and men standing by barricades in Slovyansk denied that Ukrainian forces had even entered the town on Sunday. They said one local man who had been out fishing was in a hospital with a wound from a shooting on a highway outside town. Russian television and some local residents said that the Ukrainian nationalist group Right Sector had attacked protesters at a checkpoint, injuring the fisherman. “The synchronized surgical seizure of buildings yesterday occurred in towns along the main highway, followed by armed roadblocks — almost as if a coordinated barrier was being formed between Kiev and the major eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk,” Ms. Power said.
Requests to speak to a leader of the armed men produced a man wearing a ski mask who introduced himself as Aleksandr and described himself as a deputy commander of the city of Slovyansk after its merger with the People’s Republic of Donetsk. Ukrainian officials asserted that a security operation had begun in the Donetsk region, though there were no signs of it.
He gave a different account of the circumstances in which the fisherman was wounded, saying that he had been struck by Ukrainian armored personnel carriers that opened fire on a barrier made from a pile of tires on the edge of town and then drove away. “Our guys took cover, and the shooting stopped,” he said. Andriy Parubiy, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, told Ukraine’s Channel 5 television station that “the external aggressors are very cynical putting in front of themselves civilians, at the same time they are standing with guns and hiding behind women, people of old age, sometimes youth, and holding them as a living human shield.”
Ukrainian helicopters buzzed over the town around noon, but no soldiers were seen. At one barrier, pro-Russian protesters felled trees across a road into town, guarded by men in ski masks carrying military rifles. He confirmed that his council had adopted a resolution to approve a counterterrorism operation with the “involvement of the armed forces of Ukraine.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a blistering denunciation of the Ukrainian government on its Facebook page, accusing Kiev of threatening violence “against anyone who does not agree with the nationalist-radicals, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic actions” in Kiev that, it said, were being carried out “with direct support from the United States and Europe.” Yet Ukrainian commandos who engaged in gunfights on Sunday with men who had set up roadblocks outside Slovyansk made little headway: They pulled back after a Ukrainian officer was killed and several other officers and a local resident were wounded in a shooting near a roadblock on the town’s outskirts.
Russian news media reported Sunday that the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, had arrived in Kiev on a secret visit to advise Ukrainian officials in charge of domestic security and defense. The American Embassy in the Ukrainian capital declined to comment on the reports. Mr. Turchynov then issued the ultimatum on Sunday, saying that separatists should vacate occupied buildings by Monday morning or face a “large-scale antiterrorist operation” that would involve the Ukrainian military.
The unrest in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s most populous region, began April 6 in the regional capital when pro-Russian activists seized government headquarters and declared the People’s Republic of Donetsk. The deadline at 9 a.m. passed without incident in any of the nine cities where government buildings were occupied.
According to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, 400 Makarov handguns and 20 automatic weapons were looted on Saturday from the police station in Slovyansk. “The goal of the takeover was the guns,” the ministry said. Ukraine backed away from a previous deadline of Friday after it offered, as a concession, to hold a referendum on regional autonomy and on guaranteeing the status of Russian as an official language.
By early evening Sunday, the city was gripped by fear after two unexplained shootings of cars, and as men with guns set up improvised checkpoints. The men asserted they were locals, and nothing suggested otherwise: Some wore mismatched camouflage, but most were out in jeans and ski jackets. Some appeared to be drunk.
One of the cars that were shot at, a silver Renault, had veered into a curb after it was struck, with three bullet holes on the driver’s side. Older women who had gathered nearby looked on in shock. They said the occupants had tumbled out and tried to run, but were then shot on the sidewalk. One person died and two were injured, these witnesses said.
In the other shooting, a bullet hit a taxicab, but nobody was hurt. The Ukrainian police said at least two people had been wounded in shootings in the city.