Pro-Russian Demonstrators in Eastern Ukraine Urged to Stand Down

DONETSK, Ukraine — Facing threats of forcible eviction by the Ukrainian government, pro-Russian demonstrators who have seized the 11-story government headquarters in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, suffered a further blow Wednesday when local political barons who share their deep dislike of Ukraine’s new government demanded that they give up and hand over any weapons.

The protesters, however, vowed to stand firm, fortifying barricades erected around the Donetsk regional administration building as a thinning crowd of several hundred supporters chanted “Russia, Russia” and cheered calls for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to protect them.

In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said at a news conference that demonstrators who have seized buildings in Donetsk and at least two other eastern cities had two options — “political negotiations and force.” He said the crisis would be resolved one way or the other within 48 hours.

Interior Ministry troops have already expelled protesters from a government block in Kharkiv, an industrial city north of Donetsk, while a standoff at the headquarters of the state security service in nearby Luhansk ended peacefully Wednesday, when several dozen people left the building of their own accord. The authorities had claimed earlier that 60 people had been taken hostage inside, but this was not the case, according to local journalists.Continue reading the main storyVideo

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Officials on Unrest in Ukraine

Officials from the United States, Russia and Britain discussed the growing unrest and violence in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk.

The main challenge now to the government in Kiev, which took power after President Viktor F. Yanukovych fled in February, is Donetsk, his Russian-speaking hometown and long a bastion of pro-Russia sentiment.

“We will stand to the end,” a protest leader assured a crowd outside the occupied regional administration building, which has become the headquarters of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a nominally independent but universally unrecognized state declared on Monday, and now flies the Russian instead of Ukrainian flag. “Victory will be ours. Russia is with us.”

A daylong series of defiant speeches was punctuated by jittery warnings of an imminent attack and pleas for Donetsk residents to bring bags of sugar, gasoline and other provisions to the protesters. What began as a single ring of barricades made of tires, barbed wire and bags of sand and rocks expanded Wednesday to include a second set of fortifications.Continue reading the main story

Ukraine Crisis in Maps

But there was little sign that the protesters — whom Kiev condemns as reckless separatists controlled and financed by Russia, along with die-hard supporters of Mr. Yanukovych — had expanded their support beyond a narrow fringe of fervently pro-Russian political activists and a core base of impoverished pensioners, jobless coal miners and other angry victims of Ukraine’s dysfunctional economy.

Even the Party of Regions, Mr. Yanukovych’s former governing party, declined to support the pro-Russian protest movement and its demands for a referendum on the status of the east, a move that could pave the way for secession, as happened in Crimea, which Russia annexed last month. Instead, local party barons held a news conference to denounce the seizure of official buildings and to call on protesters to quickly end their occupation and accept that Donetsk is part of Ukraine.

“These people pose a bigger and bigger threat to the majority of the population,” said Nikolai Levchenko, head of the Donetsk branch of the Party of Regions and a member of Parliament in Kiev. He said he sympathized with some of the protesters’ concerns, particularly their distress with a new government dominated by Ukrainian speakers from the west, but pleaded with them to leave occupied buildings and pursue their objectives through legal means.

Mr. Levchenko blamed the rash of occupations on the example set by pro-European demonstrators who seized buildings in Kiev and western Ukraine during their three-month-long campaign to topple Mr. Yanukovych. Protesters in Donetsk, he said, “have become moral hostages to all the things that happened in the west of Ukraine and in Kiev.”

Andrei Shishatsky, another erstwhile ally of Mr. Yanukovych who was removed as governor of Donetsk after the February revolution in Kiev, also urged protesters occupying his former office block to “leave quickly,” and emphasized that the region must remain “part of a unified and independent Ukraine.”

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