Dozens of ‘hostages’ walk free in crisis-hit Ukraine
A woman raises her fist as pro-Russians demonstrate in front of the Donetsk regional administration building, held by pro-Russian militants. — AFP photo
KYIV: Ukraine said yesterday that pro-Russian militants had released 56 ‘hostages’ as US and EU leaders agreed to meet with Russia to seek a joint solution to the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.
Hundreds of irate activists who want Ukraine’s Russified eastern industrial heartland to break away from Kyiv occupied a series of strategic buildings at the weekend and declared independence for the bustling region of Donetsk.
The raids drew instant Western charges that the Kremlin — its troops already massed along its neighbour’s eastern border in response to its ouster of a Moscow-backed president — stood behind the raids and was plotting to dismember Ukraine further, after annexing its Crimea peninsula last month.
Ukraine’s embattled leaders poured extra security forces into the flashpoint regions and regained control of the government seat in Kharkiv on Tuesday after a night of violence that included petrol bombs and stun grenades being hurled at police.
But the militants remain holed up behind barricades of razor wire and old tyres in the administration building in Donetsk and the headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU security service in Lugansk — site of the alleged hostage taking.
The SBU accused the Kalashnikov-wielding separatists of rigging the building with explosives and refusing to let 60 people already inside ‘leave the building and return home’.
The charge sparked fears that Kyiv’s Western-backed leaders had run out of patience and were preparing to storm the occupied offices after labelling the separatists ‘terrorists’.
But the SBU said yesterday that 56 people had walked free thanks to two rounds of negotiations led by unidentified lawmakers from Ukraine’s parliament.
The agency did not specify how many people were still allegedly being held against their will.
“No one was injured,” the SBU statement said.
“In order to minimise the risks to the lives and safety of citizens, the negotiations process is continuing.” Yet Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov stressed yesterday that the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in cities along Russia’s border remained in place.
“We have two options: political — in other words, negotiations — or the use of force,” Avakov told a government meeting.
Months of deadly political turmoil threaten not only to break up the vast nation on the European Union’s eastern frontier along its ethnic divisions but also plunge Moscow’s relations with the West to a low that may take decades to repair.
US Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to cast aside the last vestiges of diplomatic decorum on Tuesday by explicitly accusing the Kremlin of sending operatives into eastern Ukraine in order to foment unrest.
“Everything that we’ve seen in the last 48 hours, from Russian provocateurs and agents operating in eastern Ukraine, tells us that they’ve been sent there determined to create chaos,” Kerry told US lawmakers.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague backed up that message by noting the flareup bore ‘all the hallmarks of a Russian strategy to destabilise Ukraine’.
And Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen reaffirmed on a visit to Paris that Moscow would be making a ‘historic mistake’ if it were to intervene in Ukraine any further.
Yet the sharply barbed rhetoric has not yet led to a complete breakdown in diplomatic relations like the one that endangered global security in the nuclear-charged decades of the Cold War.
Kerry also said he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had agreed to meet in Europe next week to discuss preparations for four-way talks with Ukrainian and EU diplomats.
The office of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton later confirmed that she would meet Kerry and Lavrov as well as Ukraine’s acting Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya next week.
A source in the Russian foreign ministry told Moscow’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency that the talks would probably be held at the of the week.
None of the diplomats disclosed where the first direct international negotiations on the crisis might be held. — AFP
