News.Kyiv.Me.

Kyiv authorities freeze pension payment in Slavyansk, Kramatorsk

At a press-conference in Kyiv on Tuesday, Lyudmila Denisova said that they will restore funding as soon the situation comes back to normal. The money is available and it will be sent to the two cities when local people stop attacking armored vehicles carrying cash, she said.

Denisova said that currently the outstanding payment equals five million hryvnas.

Ukrainian gov’t asks US for armament disposed after military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan

The self-appointed Ukrainian government has requested the US to extend the list of goods supplied for the Ukrainian armed forces. The Ukrainian government wants to receive armored vehicles, arms, body armors and special equipment for intelligence purposes, RIA Novosti says, citing Defense News newsweekly.

Former Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Leonid Polyakov told Defense News that Ukrainian soldiers would be simply killed if Ukraine starts a military conflict with Russia.

“Soldiers and law enforcers have inherited military technologies and arms that can be used only to protect the current Ukrainian government. However, they are useless for a full-scale military conflict,” Polyakov said.

“Some countries, like the US can provide Ukraine with military technologies in addition to those that Ukraine can by itself,” Polyakov said.

Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, said earlier that the US had already illegally provided Ukraine with $18 million in supplies that included medicine, helmets, systems for water purification, portable generators and fuel pumps.

Ukrainian servicemen in Donetsk region left to mercy of fate – reports

Ukrainian servicemen deployed at roadblocks near the town of Krasnoarmeysk in the eastern Donetsk have been left by their commanders “to the mercy of fate”.

“They don’t supply us with food or water. We have some tinned food and cereals but we can’t cook anything as we have no cooking staff. And we can’t leave the roadblock, we have been ordered not to,” soldiers complained, the ITAR-TASS news agency reports.

Local residents occasionally bring some food, a soldier said.

The servicemen were promised 2,700 hryvnias but have been paid only 600 hryvnias over a month and a half.

They gave their commanders an ultimatum, demanding that the rest be paid in three days or they would block traffic.

At the same time, they refuse to side with the self-defense volunteer forces.

“We don’t know why we are here. It looks like we are guarding no one but ourselves. But we can guard ourselves at home. There is no need to do it here. No one is attacking us,” a soldier said.

Earlier, a source in the self-defense units of the town, Kramatorsk, told ITAR-TASS that discontent was brewing among Ukrainian servicemen.

“They have food problems. They say they don’t want war, don’t want to shoot or kill anyone… But they refuse to surrender, to disobey commanders’ orders,”the spokesman said.

Moscow demands halt of military actions in Ukrane’s southeast Russian-Foreign Ministry

The Russian Foreign Ministry says it is outraged by operations the Kyiv authorities launched in the southeastern part of Ukraine early on Saturday. “The situation around Slavyansk in the Donetsk region dramatically worsened in the early hours of May 17. Ukrainian troops supported by aviation once again attempted to storm the city. This time, civilian installations were shelled by heavy artillery. Some people were wounded. A real threat to peaceful civilian lives was created. All this provokes Russia’s rightful outrage,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

“We are insisting once again on the immediate stoppage of military actions by Kyiv in the southeastern part of Ukraine,” it said.

“Such punitive actions against their own citizens show the hypocrisy of the Kyiv authorities who falsely declare their willingness to comply with the provisions of the Geneva Declaration concluded on April 17, 2014 and with the road map, developed by the OSCE,” the Foreign Ministry said.

Ukraine’s Right Sector leader threatens guerrilla war in eastern Ukraine, Crimea

Ukraine’s Right Sector ultra-right movement is forming a special battalion, Donbass-2, tasked with waging a large-scale guerilla war in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Right Sector leader and Ukrainian presidential candidate Dmitry Yarosh said in a pre-election TV debate on Sunday.

Yarosh, for whom an arrest warrant was issued in Russia in absentia for crimes committed in Chechnya, vowed to return Crimea, now part of Russia, to Ukraine, hoping to achieve that through unleashing a guerilla war on the peninsula and through provocations using Crimean Tatars.

Ukrainian National Guard radicals shoot dead 10 soldiers who wished to side with federalists

National Guard militants have shot dead ten soldiers who wanted to defect to self-defense volunteer forces in the town of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine, Stella Khorosheva, the official spokeswoman for Slavyansk People’s Mayor Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, told the RIA Novosti news agency by telephone on Sunday.

“Ten soldiers wanted to join us but were shot dead by Ukrainian Guard commanders,” she said.

Khorosheva could say nothing about casualties among self-defense fighters.

For now, there are no clashes inside the city, but an unmanned aircraft has been noticed over the railway station, she said.