Pro-Russian Separatists Fire on Luhansk Police Station, Capture Government Building
by VOA News April 29, 2014
Pro-Russian separatists fired on a police station in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine Tuesday after seizing the regional government headquarters.
The separatists opened fire with automatic weapons and threw stun grenades at the local police headquarters, trying to force police inside to surrender their weapons.
The regional prosecutor's office and television center were also taken over by separatists Tuesday, a Reuters photographer at the scene said.
Hundreds of pro-Russian separatists had stormed the regional government headquarters in Ukraine's eastern city earlier Tuesday. They met no resistance from police.
The government in Kyiv has all but lost control of its police forces in parts of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian activists have seized buildings in the region's second biggest city of Donetsk and several smaller towns.
'The regional leadership does not control its police force,'' said Stanislav Rechynsky, an aide to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. 'The local police did nothing.''
Pro-Moscow activists in Luhansk, a city of 465,000 inhabitants near the Russian border, seized the local Security Service building three weeks ago.
Injured mayor
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, is being treated in Israel after being shot in the back while riding his bike Monday outside Kharkiv.
The Elisha hospital in Haifa issued a statement saying Hennady Kernes' surgeries appear to have been successful.
The Kharkiv city legislature's website said Kernes is in a chemically induced coma and on lung ventilation. The site said the mayor, who is Jewish, was flown to Israel because doctors there have more experience treating gunshot wounds.
After pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted from office in February, Kernes, 54, supported calls for Kharkiv to become independent from Kyiv's new, pro-European leadership.
But he later tempered his views after being accused of fomenting separatism and when Ukrainian police forced pro-Russian protesters out of administrative buildings in the city.
One presidential candidate in Ukraine said the shooting of Kharkiv's mayor is an attempt to destabilize the eastern Ukrainian city, which is home to 1.5 million people.
Sanctions
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Tuesday that international sanctions on Russia are putting pressure on Russia's economy, and that more actions may be taken if Russia's stance does not change.
'You have to look over the period of time Russia went into Crimea, since we've imposed sanctions, there has been a quite substantial deterioration in Russia's already weak economy,' Lew told a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. 'We see it in their stock exchange, we see it in their exchange rate, we see it in a number of important economic indicators.''
Lew said the United States is keeping its options open and is prepared to take further action if Russian policy toward Ukraine doesn't change.
The European Union Tuesday announced asset freezes and travel bans on 15 Russians and Ukrainians over Moscow's actions in Ukraine, but the measures were seen as less aggressive than sanctions imposed this week by the United States
While visiting Cuba Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed U.S. and European Union sanctions, saying they defied common sense and were the work of weak politicians in the West 'attempting to blame others.'
In separatist-held Slovyansk, the self-declared mayor said he would discuss the release of detained military observers only if the European Union dropped sanctions against rebel leaders.
But later in the day, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov said 'good progress' had been made in talks with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on the release of seven of its observers held since Friday. The observers had travelled to eastern Ukraine under the auspices of the democracy watchdog.
Troops on border
Meantime, there is no visible sign that tens of thousands of Russian troops are withdrawing from close to the Ukraine border, a NATO official said Tuesday.
In a phone call Monday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Russian forces, which started drills near the border last week, had returned to their permanent positions, according to the Russian government.
'We currently have no information that indicates a withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian border. We continue to urge Russia to abide by the Geneva agreement and to pull back all its troops along the Ukrainian border in favour of diplomacy and dialogue,'' a NATO official told Reuters.
Some information for this report contributed by AP and Reuters.
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