SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian government on Sunday for the first time sent its security services to confront armed pro-Russian militants in the country’s east, defying warnings from Russia. Commandos engaged in gunfights with men who had set up roadblocks and stormed a Ukrainian police station in Slovyansk, and at least one officer was killed, Ukrainian officials said. Several officers were injured in the operation, as were four locals, the officials said. Russian news media and residents here disputed that account, saying the Ukrainian forces had only briefly engaged one checkpoint.
In either case, the central government in Kiev has turned to force to try to restore its authority in the east, a course of action that the Russian government has repeatedly warned against. With tens of thousands of Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s eastern border near Donetsk, Western leaders have worried that Moscow might use unrest in Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking areas as a pretext for an invasion. Both governments intensified their statements on Sunday. Ukraine’s interim president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, issued another ultimatum, saying separatists should vacate occupied buildings by Monday or face a “large-scale antiterrorist operation” that would include the Ukrainian military. And Russia claimed that the Ukrainian government was cracking down at the behest of American and European officials.
Ukraine’s ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, speaking late Sunday in Rostov-on-Don, in Russia, echoed Moscow’s charges of American meddling. Insisting that he remained Ukraine’s commander in chief despite having fled to Russia more than a month ago, he ordered Ukrainian troops to defy what he called “criminal orders” for a crackdown and said the country stood “on the brink of civil war.” The police station contested by Ukrainian forces was one of several security centers in the eastern region of Donetsk that were seized on Saturday by masked gunmen in coordinated raids that the Ukrainian authorities denounced as Russian “aggression.”
By Sunday afternoon, the government’s push to reassert its authority in a vitally important industrial and coal-mining region appeared to have made little headway. Pro-Russian protesters appeared to control not only the police station but also the entire town of Slovyansk, having set up checkpoints at major streets leading into town. ...Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a blistering denunciation of the Ukrainian government. In a statement on the ministry’s Facebook page, the Russian government accused the Kiev authorities of threatening violence “against anyone who does not agree with the nationalist-radicals, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic actions” in Kiev that, it said, were being carried out “with direct support from the United States and Europe.”
At Russia’s request, an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council was held Sunday night. Security Council members traded competing narratives of what was happening in eastern Ukraine, as Russia’s envoy, Vitaly I. Churkin, echoed the views of the Kremlin and his Western rivals deplored what they called Russian propaganda. Mr. Churkin called on world leaders to condemn the “henchmen of the Maidan,” a reference to Independence Square in Kiev, where the uprising that led to the president’s ouster unfolded. The British ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, pointed the finger at Moscow. “What we are witnessing is a well-orchestrated campaign to destabilize the country,” he said.
In Washington, the State Department took the unusual step of issuing a “fact sheet” alleging that Russian officials had made 10 false claims about the crisis in Ukraine. “Russia continues to spin a false and dangerous narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine,” the State Department said. “We would not be seeing the violence and sad events that we’ve witnessed this weekend without this relentless stream of disinformation and Russian provocateurs fostering unrest in eastern Ukraine".
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/world/eu...
Posted By: Jen Fad
Monday, April 14th 2014 at 9:12AM
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