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Luhansk Dispatch: Armed Pro-Russian Protesters Set For Standoff With Police

April 07, 2014
by Andriy Kuznetsov

LUHANSK, Ukraine -- In Luhansk, everything is now in place for a potentially bloody standoff between pro-Russian protesters and Ukrainian police that could dramatically escalate tensions in the east of the country.

The hundreds of protesters who seized the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) regional headquarters on April 6 have broken into the building's armory and can now arm themselves from it at will.

And, while police fear they may try to smuggle the weapons out, the protesters themselves say they have no intention of doing so. Instead, they are barricading themselves within the building for an apparently extended stay.

A spokesperson for the protesters, who gave his name only as Oleksy, refused to tell press outside the building on April 7 how many guns had been seized. But he said there were 'enough to resist takeover of the building' by security forces.

Hundreds more protesters remain outside the building and are erecting barricades of tires in what appears to be the start of the first pro-Russian 'maidan' of the Ukrainian crisis. Nearby stands a truck that has delivered tons of bricks for protesters to use against any riot police who try to evict them.

Many of the protesters, who were estimated on April 6 to number some 1,000 but whose ranks have since thinned, carry metal bars or wooden clubs and have stockpiles of empty bottles for making Molotov cocktails.

The digging in of the pro-Russian protesters in this city just 25 kilometers from the Russian border adds a flammable new ingredient to the situation in eastern Ukraine, where until now the seizure of buildings has been a violent but short-term business.

That pattern now seems to have changed, with pro-Russian protesters also seizing the regional government seat in Donetsk on April 6. There, some 100 people who remain inside proclaimed a sovereign 'People's Republic of Donetsk' on April 7 and called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to send a 'temporary peacekeeping contingent.'

In Kharkiv, several dozen people also broke into the regional government building during a protest on April 6 then left it again.

Particularly Volatile

The situation in Luhansk is made particularly volatile not just by the fact the protesters are digging in but also by the nature of their demands.

The protesters are calling for the release of 15 activists who were arrested by the SBU earlier this week on suspicion of plotting violent unrest. The 15 men were seized in the Luhansk region along with a cache of 300 assault rifles, a grenade launcher, and large numbers of grenades, petrol bombs, and knives.

Just what is the protesters' connection to the 15 suspects, now in jail in Kyiv, is impossible to know. Those around the building say they are members of organizations called the 'Luhansk Guard' or the 'People's Self Defense Force,' or other names that tell little about them. Some of the men are from the city of Luhansk itself, while others are from the surrounding region.

According to their spokesman Oleksy, the protestors also want a referendum on the federalization of Ukraine and want Russian to be officially designated as the country's second state language.

As the protesters show no signs of leaving, the next move belongs to the Ukrainian authorities. The head of the SBU, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, and the head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy, flew into Luhansk from Kyiv on April 7 to chart a course.

Meanwhile, the population of Luhansk remains divided over how to regard the takeover of the SBU headquarters by pro-Russian protesters.

Luhansk is entirely Russian-speaking because even Ukrainian speakers use Russian in the city's daily life, but questions of how people see the country's future go far beyond linguistic lines.

Older people, particularly those who remember the Soviet Union, generally favor Ukraine moving closer to Russia. Younger people and intellectuals generally favor closer European integration. The divides can be between families and even within families, making any predictions about the desires of people in Luhansk as a whole extremely difficult.

Written by Charles Recknagel in Prague based on reporting from Luhansk by Andriy Kuznetsov. Merkhat Sharipzhanov contributed to this report

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-luhansk- standoff-police/25324437.html

Copyright (c) 2014. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.