A line of combat vehicles flying Russian flags rolled Wednesday morning into Slovyansk, a city of 120,000 where separatists have set up road blocks since Saturday. One soldier named Andrei, speaking to the Associated Press, identified the men as part of the 25th brigade of Ukraine’s airborne forces that had switched to the side of pro-Russian forces. The troops in green camouflage and packing automatic weapons and grenade launchers received a warm welcome from local separatists, AP said. The report could not be immediately verified.
Around 10 a.m. local time, a squad of separatists backed by seven masked gunmen in camouflage stormed the seat of Donetsk’s mayor and local council. On Wednesday morning, they appeared to be allowing employees in this city of nearly 1 million people to exit the building freely, and suited bureaucrats were running back and forth to vehicles in an attempt to save files and computers. A barricade of old tires blocked the rear entrance while men in unmarked camouflage patrolled the front of the building.
A city spokesman said Mayor Alexander Lukyanchenko was inside the building, and negotiating with the separatists who were demanding the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev grant the rights for regions to hold their own referendums on their futures.
The move came 10 days after a larger squad of militants seized Donetsk’s larger regional administration building. “They seem to want to show how serious they are,”said Oleg Reshetnyak, a local journalist present when militants stormed City Hall.
Russia said it was still planning to attend four-party talks aimed at resolving the Ukrainian crisis in Geneva on Thursday and would use the meeting to press for the launch of constitutional reform in Ukraine.
“The meeting is still on the agenda,” Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, told reporters on Wednesday in Hanoi. “Ukraine must be forced to start genuine rather than cosmetic constitutional reform.”
Lavrov is expected to represent Russia at the talks in Geneva that will likely be attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Catherine Ashton , the European foreign policy chief and Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Andrii Deshchytsia .
The U.S. and the EU are piling pressure on the Kremlin to help deescalate the crisis by removing support for pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine
However, Lavrov stressed that the only way out of the crisis was to push Kiev to adopt sweeping constitutional reforms that devolved more power to Ukrainian regions.
“Sincere friends of the Ukrainian people must force the incumbent authorities finally to move from words to deeds and begin a genuine and comprehensive constitutional reform” to guarantee the rights of all regions of the country, he said.
The White House stood by Ukraine’s response.
“The Ukrainian government has a responsibility to provide law and order, and these provocations in eastern Ukraine are creating a situation in which the government has to respond,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
The government in Kiev appeared to show a new, if tempered, willingness to back up its pledge in recent days to restore order. On Tuesday, witnesses reported heavy gunfire as a Ukrainian jet tried to land at an airfield in Kramatorsk, a city 10 miles south of Slovyansk, where pro-Russian forces first set up roadblocks Saturday.
Shortly afterward, Ukrainian troops were ferried to the site by helicopter and encountered a hostile reception by protesters. What followed, officials and witnesses said, was a tense standoff in which the troops repeatedly opened fire to push protesters back beyond the perimeter fences.
It remained unclear whether the area was fully or temporarily secured. But Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, described the move as part of a “counterterrorism operation” against pro-Russian separatists in the northern part of the Donetsk region.
“Soon there will be no terrorists left in Donetsk or any other region,” Turchynov vowed in parliament on Tuesday. “They will sit in prison, their proper place.”
Stanislav Rechinsky, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, told reporters in Kiev that there had been no fatalities during the operation by Ukrainian special forces at the airfield. Witnesses said that crowds of pro-Russian activists had roughed up a commander in the area who approached them after the airfield was supposed to be secured and that they remained on the airfield’s edge, hurling abuse at military officials.
“The aim of the operation was to avoid casualties among our people, and it is also desirable to save the lives of the separatists, because some of them are our citizens,” Rechinsky said.
In contrast to Ukraine’s official statements, however, Russian state television reported that four to 11 people had been killed in the operation. Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted a pro-Russian militiaman as saying that fighters from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Right Sector movement and foreign mercenaries were involved in storming the airfield.
The divergent accounts illustrated the gap between Kiev and Moscow as the crisis appeared to be deepening.
Ukrainian troops gather
On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials and witnesses reported an ongoing buildup of their forces not far from Izyum, a city near the border of Kharkiv and Donetsk provinces in the east. Izyum is 32 miles northwest of Slovyansk, which Ukrainian forces failed to retake from well-armed pro-Russian activists Sunday in an operation that left two people dead.
An Izyum official involved in the mobilization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the city was being used as a fueling and feeding station for Ukrainian troops, who began arriving over the weekend and were taking up positions outside the city limits.
Journalists reported seeing columns of armored personnel carriers and buses moving toward Slovyansk. But Rechinsky denied that the Ukrainian military had moved into the city, suggesting that the government remained leery of a full-on confrontation with pro-Russian forces, some of whom are heavily armed with weapons similar or identical to those used by the Russian military. Instead, the government focused on further attempts to defuse the situation in Slovyansk and elsewhere through negotiations.
“In Slovyansk, there is no equipment, no troops, although there are many panicked reports in the media about the movement of tanks, armored personnel carriers and so on,” Rechinsky said.
In recent days, Turchynov first vowed to rout the protesters by force, then held out the possibility of a referendum to decide Ukraine’s fate. But nothing has appeared to move the militants to surrender.
There is deep uncertainty about the technical ability of Ukraine’s underfunded and demoralized military to respond to pro-Russian forces, who Ukrainian officials say are being guided and perhaps supplied by Russian military commanders.
‘Responsibly and prudently’
Turchynov told parliament on Tuesday that the effort to quell the rebellion in the east would “go on gradually, responsibly and prudently.” He pledged that there would be no civil war, and he emphasized that “these actions are meant for the protection of Ukrainian citizens, stopping terror, criminality and attempts to break our country into pieces.”
The militants represent a minority in eastern Ukraine, but the government in Kiev is also combating a much broader sense of skepticism in the east, with criticism mounting over officials’ handling of the economy in particular. Driving home that point, the central bank on Tuesday was forced to jack up interest rates in an effort to stem a precipitous fall in the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia.
Residents in Donetsk — where pro-Russian forces have seized the regional administrative office and are patrolling the area day and night — have also lashed out at government plans to slash gas subsidies to meet the demands of a desperately needed $18 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
“Do they think we are rich?” asked Marina Aleksandrovna, a 50-year-old cleaning woman. “I am not an economist or a politician, but I can tell you that people are not having to deal with these problems in Russia.”
Isabel Gorst in Moscow contributed to this report.
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