Volunteers aim to reclaim city from pro-Russian rebels
MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Steelworkers from plants owned by the country’s richest man joined police on patrols on Friday to reverse the tide of lawlessness in this industrial port city.
About 120 kilometres north of Mariupol, armed volunteers dressed in black stationed in a village just inside the troubled Donetsk region said they intend to expel their foes through force if necessary.
The groups opposed to pro-Russian insurgents who have swept through eastern Ukraine have scored early successes, but threaten to open a new and dangerously unpredictable cycle of confrontation.
Government forces have in recent weeks achieved limited results in quashing the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” — armed formations that this week declared independence for their regions following contentious referendums.
That has handed the initiative to forces acting independently of authorities in the capital, Kyiv.
In Mariupol, the secondlargest city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, billionaire Rinat Akhmetov’s Metinvest holding group agreed with steel plant directors, police and community leaders to help improve security and get insurgents to vacate the buildings they had seized.
Several dozen Metinvest workers in overalls and helmets Friday cleared out barricades of debris and tires outside the Mariupol government building. Trucks carried it away and by midday, the barricades were nearly gone.
“(Residents are) tired of war and chaos. Burglaries and marauding have to stop,” said Viktor Gusak, one of the Metinvest employees cleaning the street.
Akhmetov has been notable for his noncommittal stance during the turbulence that has for more than a month gripped the region, which is home to his most lucrative industrial assets, so the development is noteworthy.
A video statement by Akhmetov, 47, on Thursday made it clear that his loyalties are not so much with the Kyiv government but with his native Donbass — a territory that encompasses the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The only way, he said, was to effect major constitutional reforms, while preserving a united Ukraine.
“This is when power goes from Kyiv to the regions. This is when authorities are not appointed but elected. And this is when local authorities take responsibility for people’s real future,” he said.
Independence or absorption into Russia would spell economic catastrophe for the region, he said.
Since Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster as president in February, Ukraine’s new leadership has reached out to oligarchs for help — appointing them as governors in eastern regions, where loyalties to Moscow were strong. Akhmetov, who served in Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has avoided such engagements and his attempt to set future terms on the future of the east may cause the government to bristle.
A representative of the self- proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic was also a party to the Akhmetov-brokered deal in Mariupol, but the insurgent group later disavowed its participation.
Instead, Donetsk People’s Republic adviser Roman Manekin said in his own video address that Akhmetov should submit to the authority of the new would-be independent entity.