Pro-Russian gunmen seize police station in restive eastern Ukraine

SLAVYANSK

A few dozen gunmen on Saturday seized a police station in Ukraine’s restive eastern industrial heartland amid spreading protests in favour of the heavily Russified region joining Kremlin rule.

The attack and a failed assault on the prosecutor’s office in the local capital Donetsk underscored the volatility of a crisis that EU and US diplomats hope to deescalate when they gather their Moscow and Kiev counterparts for four-way peace talks in Geneva on Thursday.

Ukraine’s Western-backed leaders have been under intense pressure from Russia since their February ouster of a pro-Kremlin regime, with Moscow massing troops on Ukraine’s border after annexing its Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and nearly doubling the rates it charges Kiev for gas.

Russia is now ready to demand prepayment from the cash-strapped government for future gas deliveries or halt supplies — a cut-off that would impact at least 18 EU countries and add further urgency to the worst East-West standoff since the Cold War.

But the siege more immediately highlights how little sway Kiev’s untested leaders have over pro-Russians who since April 6 have already been in control of the Donetsk government seat and a state security building in the nearby eastern city of Lugansk.

Ukranian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk visited the region on Friday in a failed attempt to pacify protesters with a vague promise of more sweeping regional rights.

The morning raid on the police station happened in Slavyansk — a riverside town of 100,000 about 60 kilometres north of the regional capital Donetsk.
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said the attack was led by “armed men in camouflage fatigues” but provided few other details. “Our response will be very severe,” Avakov wrote on his Facebook page.

A local police official told Kiev’s private Channel Five television that the assault involved about 20 men who fired several shots into the air before storming the station.

It was not immediately clear how the local police responded or whether the gunmen had taken any hostages.

But Avakov said that Ukrainian special forces had been dispatched to the scene.

“There is zero tolerance for armed terrorists,” he said.

Donetsk separatist leader Sergiy Tsyplakov claimed responsibility for the raid in a statement issued to Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency.