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Ukraine Asks U.N. for Peacekeeping Troops as Militants Defy Deadline Ukraine Asks U.N. To Help Control Insurgent East
(about 7 hours later)
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. KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s failure to enforce its own ultimatums and its appeal on Monday to the United Nations to send peacekeepers laid bare a grim reality for the shaky government in Kiev, where political leaders and security forces have few reliable ways to confront Russian-backed separatists in the restive east.
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. A deadline set by Ukraine’s acting president for the start of a “large-scale antiterrorist operation” in the east passed without any clear police or military intervention. Meanwhile, pro-Russian militants seized yet another government building in the Donetsk region, bringing to at least nine the number of eastern towns now swept up in a spiraling insurgency.
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. The country’s acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, asked the United Nations to send peacekeepers. But the move was widely viewed as an act of desperation, given that Russia holds a veto at the United Nations Security Council and is unlikely to assent to a such a request.
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. The confused and passive response underscored Kiev’s limited options in challenging pro-Russian militants and their backers in Moscow. Too assertive a response could cause heavy civilian casualties and play into Moscow’s narrative that Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine are threatened and need protection. Too timid a response risks inviting more meddling from Moscow or giving free rein to local armed militants.
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. Ukraine’s armed forces, demoralized and underequipped, are so short of funds that when the government ordered them on high alert last month as Russian forces seized Crimea, a Ukrainian billionaire had to buy the military fuel. The businessman, Ihor Kolomoysky, now the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region next to Donetsk, said he put up around $5 million of his own money to pay for gasoline and batteries so that Ukrainian military vehicles could leave their garages and helicopters could get off the ground.
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. Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as SBU, is so riddled with Russian informers that when John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, visited Kiev over the weekend on a supposedly secret trip, Russian state news media swiftly revealed his visit and declared it evidence that Washington was calling the shots in Ukraine and pushing for a crackdown in the east.
“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.” Even Alfa, an elite Ukrainian special forces unit that takes pride in taking on perilous missions, has appeared feckless in its response to the unrest 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. It lost an officer on Sunday to gunfire, apparently from the pro-Russian side in Slovyansk. The force has made no headway since in entering the city, never mind freeing government buildings there from unidentified gunmen.
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.” As with other arms of Ukraine’s security and intelligence services, some members have divided loyalties and seem disinclined to engage in a fight against pro-Moscow militants that would put older women and other residents who support the gunmen in the line of fire.
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. Alfa, under investigation for its role in cracking down on protesters in the capital during the uprising against the ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, did not deploy, as expected, to remove pro-Russian militants from Slovyansk on Monday.
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. The government’s failure to take back control of Slovyansk and other eastern towns has humiliated and infuriated Ukrainians who had hoped that the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych would allow their country to move out of Moscow’s shadow toward Europe.
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. “We have been left defenseless,” shouted a uniformed Cossack from a stage in Kiev’s Independence Square, the focal point of three months of protests against Mr. Yanukovych and now a magnet for those unhappy with what has happened since he fled to Russia in February. “I ask the government to give us arms — what we need is this,” he said, waving a Kalashnikov rifle to cheers from the crowd.
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. Photographs posted on social media websites on Monday showed Ukrainian tanks purportedly on the main road north of Slovyansk, suggesting that the Kiev government was gearing up for a counterattack or at least a show of force to appease critics that it has not done enough to protect eastern Ukraine from the fate of Crimea, which Russia annexed last month.
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 rebellion in Donetsk and other eastern provinces presents Kiev with a choice of using extensive force that might only expand so far modest public support in the east for the militants or simply pleading for calm, a course that has so far only emboldened the pro-Russian rebels. It is dilemma that would not be easy even if Ukraine had a completely loyal security and military machine, but not having one makes the choice far more difficult.
“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.” The plea for help to the United Nations was highly unlikely to be met as Russia, a permanent member of the security council, would almost certainly veto any move backed by the West to send peacekeepers. Russia agreed last month to let the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe send monitors to eastern Ukraine, but they confine themselves to writing reports.
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. All this leaves Ukraine largely on its own to fight off a well-coordinated campaign of attacks on government buildings that it decries as Russian aggression but which it has so far been unable to prove incontrovertibly involves Russian soldiers, agents or money. Having already lost Crimea, Mr. Turchynov, the acting president, vowed on Sunday that “we will not let Russia repeat the Crimean scenario in the eastern region of Ukraine.”
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. But if Russia is indeed now seeking to repeat its Crimea seizure, something that Moscow has repeatedly denied, Ukraine’s defenses are fragile.
“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. So, too, is the government amid rising public anger at its inability to keep the country together. After another day of bleak news from the east, protesters set tires on fire late Monday outside the Parliament in Kiev. They demanded that the acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov, resign and that Mr. Turchynov explain why things have gone so wrong.
Ukrainian officials asserted that a security operation had begun in the Donetsk region, though there were no signs of it. The SBU, under new leadership since Ukraine’s February revolution, has repeatedly boasted of catching suspected Russian operatives in the east, but it has not yet made public any solid evidence to support Kiev’s assertions that the mayhem in Donetsk and neighboring provinces has been orchestrated and financed by Moscow. This has left the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, free to taunt Kiev and the West for making accusations they have not yet substantiated. It has also compromised Ukraine’s efforts to compete, at least in eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself, with Moscow’s own narrative of Western meddling.
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.” Alfa, by contrast, does appear to be more or less functioning, but its officers, bitter at being challenged over their role under Mr. Yanukovych, do not understand when “you tell them one day that they are murderers and then send them the next day to free a building” in Donetsk, said Serhiy Skorokhvatov, a former officer in the force and president of its veterans association.
He confirmed that his council had adopted a resolution to approve a counterterrorism operation with the “involvement of the armed forces of Ukraine.” Like other police and special forces units, Alfa took part in what Mr. Yanukovych called an “antiterrorist operation” and worked to crush the pro-European protests that brought the current government to office. Oleh Prysizhniy, who headed Alfa until Mr. Yanukovych fled, is under investigation by both Parliament and the prosecutor general for the unit’s possible role in killing protesters.
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. Ordered on Sunday to retake the town of Slovyansk, Alfa quickly backed off the mission after one of its officers was shot and killed as he walked away from negotiations with the rebels. A full-scale assault by Alfa, cautioned Mr. Skorokhvatov, might free the occupied Slovyansk police station but would not end the crisis. “Alfa is a scalpel, but it is impossible to use it cut down a tree,” he said.
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. Many of the security officials who served Mr. Yanukovych have been dismissed and, in some cases, have fled to Russia, but the legacy of more than two decades of close cooperation between Kiev and Moscow on security issues remains embedded in a security apparatus established and controlled by Moscow under the Soviet Union. Such links raise questions about loyalties.
The deadline at 9 a.m. passed without incident in any of the nine cities where government buildings were occupied. Among those who took refuge in Russia is Alexander Yakimenko, the former head of Ukraine’s State Security Service, the post-independence successor organization to the Ukrainian branch of the K.G.B. While Mr. Yakimenko is gone, the agency he left behind is infested with informers and agents whose loyalties lie more with Moscow than Kiev.
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. “We can’t change this overnight,” said the deputy defense minister, Leonid Polyakov. “The system was so deeply penetrated by the Russians. We have to operate in this environment.”
This helps explain why Ukraine’s government has been caught flat-footed repeatedly by events in the east, where buildings that were obvious targets for attacks by pro-Russian militants were left guarded by just a handful of local police officers, who, outnumbered and outgunned, often ran away.
Kiev’s Independence Square, the focal point of protests against Mr. Yanukovych, has echoed in recent days with angry denunciations of authorities for their failure to crush separatists in the east and calls for citizens to take up arms to defend the country.
A recent opinion poll in Donetsk suggested that less than a third of the population wants to join Russia, far less than the proportion that wants Ukraine to remain intact. Donetsk residents who support Kiev increasingly wonder why a pro-Russian minority has been able to run amok.
“The ball is now on the side of Kiev,” wrote Oleksandr Honcharov, a lawyer from Donetsk, on his blog. “If the government cannot stabilize the situation, does it deserve to be called the government at all?”