Grenade kills Ukraine police officer
Blast comes in clash over shifting power to separatist regions in east
KYIV, UKRAINE — A grenade exploded outside Ukraine’s parliament during a nationalist protest against a vote to give greater powers to separatist regions in the east, killing one police officer, the Interior Ministry said. About 100 other officers were injured, 10 seriously.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko described the clashes as “a bloody provocation” and called for the prosecution of the attackers.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said that about 30 people have been detained, including the person who threw the grenade.
The decentralization of power was a condition of a truce signed in Minsk in February aimed at ending the fighting between Ukrainian government troops and Russia-backed separatists that has left more than 6,800 dead since April 2014.
But some Ukrainians oppose changing the constitution, saying that it would threaten the country’s sovereignty and independence.
A total of 265 deputies in the 450-seat parliament gave preliminary approval Monday to the changes proposed by President Petro Poroshenko. Three parties that are part of the majority coalition in parliament, however, opposed the constitutional changes.
“This is not a road to peace and not a road to decentralization,” said the leader of one of those parties, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. “This is the diametrically opposite process, which will lead to the loss of new territories.”
Parliamentary speaker Vladimir Groisman denied that the changes would lead to the loss of the Donetsk region, where there have been clashes with separatists.
“There is no hint of federalism. Ukraine was, is and will be a unified state,” he said.
With the decentralization bill, Poroshenko found himself in a tight spot. While Ukrainian nationalists fear the bill would incite separatism, Russia-backed rebels and Moscow say the bill doesn’t give regions enough powers and is short of the pledges made in Minsk.
A final vote on the constitutional changes will come in parliament’s fall session, beginning Tuesday. No specific date has yet been set.
Avakov blamed the clashes on the Svoboda party, which polled under five per cent in last year’s parliamentary election, and its leader, Oleg Tyahnybok, who stood side by side with Avakov during the 2013 anti-government protests which toppled thenpresident Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. “No political differences can justify what you did outside the Rada today,” Avakov said, referring to the parliament.
Svoboda blamed the government, saying that it “provoked Ukrainians to protest” by presenting a bill which is tantamount to “capitulation to the Kremlin.”