Ukraine’s militia are on “full combat alert” against a likely Russian invasion, Kiev said Wednesday, as authorities admitted they were “helpless” to avoid pro-Kremlin insurgents tightening their grip at the increasingly chaotic east of the rustic.
Rebels stormed the regional police building and city hall within the eastern Ukrainian city of Gorlivka, local officials told AFP, adding to greater than a dozen locations already under their control.
The new seizure followed clashes in nearby Lugansk on Tuesday, as hundreds of professional-Russia protesters spearheaded by a heavily armed mob attacked the police station.
On Wednesday, the rebels lifted their siege of the HQ building after the police chief promised to step down.
In another apparent gain for the rebels, local media reported pro-Russian militants had seized the council building inside the city of Alchevsk without encountering resistance.
Ukraine’s interim president Oleksandr Turchynov told his cabinet that the nation’s law enforcement bodies were “helpless” to avoid the insurgents storming official buildings within the restive east.
He said the nation’s militia were placed on “full combat alert” within the face of what he called a “real threat” of Russia starting a war against the previous Soviet Republic.
Turchynov urged Ukrainian “patriots” to reinforce the beleaguered police force, which he has criticized for “inaction and on occasion treachery”.
His priority was to avoid “terrorism” spreading within the restive east, where he said some law enforcement officials were even cooperating with the separatists.
He warned also that there can be “acts of sabotage” by Russia during public holidays initially of May.
‘Undeclared war’
The defence ministry announced that the safety services would hold drills in central Kiev overnight but this was not expected to involve military hardware.
Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who’s a pacesetter for presidential elections on May 25, said Russia had already started an “undeclared war” against her country.
The West has accused Russia of fomenting the crisis and backing the rebels and has imposed sanctions to aim to get Moscow to go into reverse.
The United states of america and EU members see the insurgency as a bid to destabilize Ukraine earlier than the elections but Moscow denies it has a hand within the rebellion.
President Vladimir Putin insisted late Tuesday that there have been “neither Russian instructors, nor special units, nor troops” operating in Ukraine.
The separatists have vowed to carry a referendum on closer ties with Russia on May 11.
And Denis Pushilin, one of several leaders of the self-declared Donetsk Republic, told reporters on a visit to Moscow that the eastern Ukrainian region won’t participate in the May 25 presidential polls.
The Kremlin said Putin had spoken to British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday and both had agreed that an end to the crisis could only be achieved through peaceful means.
Hope for the OSCE
Meanwhile, negotiations continued to secure the liberty of 7 European monitors from the OSCE because the rebel leader holding them said they’d be released “at the primary opportunity”.
“The dialogue is constructive. We understand one another,” the self-styled mayor of the flashpoint town of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov told reporters.
Talks are dragging on for “technical reasons,” he added, without elaborating.
Michael Bociurkiw, an OSCE spokesman, told reporters in nearby Donetsk that the held men were “in good health” but added: “As the times roll on, you become increasingly eager about their well-being.”
Putin said he hoped the team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would soon have the capacity to “freely leave the territory” of Ukraine, but laid the blame squarely at Kiev’s door.
Officials, he said, “should have understood that they (the OSCE inspectors) were entering a conflict zone, a region of the rustic that doesn’t recognize the authorities’ legitimacy”.
‘Already in recession’
Putin also warned the sanctions against his country could harm Western interests in Russia’s lucrative energy sector.
“If this continues, we shall obviously ought to reflect on how (foreign companies) work within the Russian Federation, including in key sectors of the Russian economy together with energy,” said Putin, speaking at a regional summit in Minsk.
His comments threaten the operations of a few of the world’s biggest energy companies within the resource-rich country, once viewed as a competent alternative to unstable natural gas and oil-producing countries inside the Middle East.
The EU said talks with Russia and Ukraine will show up in Warsaw on Friday to check out to solve a $3.5-billion (2.5-billion-euro) gas bill Gazprom calculates Kiev owes. Putin has threatened to chop off the gas flow to Ukraine whether it is not quickly paid.
Russian officials have accused the united states of desirous to reinstitute “Iron Curtain”-style policies and warned the sanctions would “boomerang” back to harm it.
But the tensions are already having an impact at the Russian economy, which the International Monetary Fund announced Wednesday was already “experiencing recession”.
The IMF drastically slashed its 2014 growth forecast for Russia to 0.2 percent from 1.3 percent, amid massive capital outflows because the crisis began.
The Ukrainian economy can be suffering, in keeping with government data published Wednesday, with the economy shrinking 2.0 percent within the first quarter in comparison with the last three months of 2013.
The EU, which Russia has accused of “doing Washington’s bidding”, is thinking about beefing up sanctions by targeting Putin’s inner circle but some member states are “very reluctant”, sources told AFP in Brussels.
The crisis in Ukraine has slipped rapidly right into a global confrontation since February, when Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych was forced out after months of increasingly bloody protests.
In response, Moscow launched a blitz annexation of the peninsula of Crimea, and stepped up troops deployments at the border.
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