A version of the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic hung in an occupied government building.
A group of protesters who have seized the government headquarters in
Donetsk, Ukraine, was urged by local politicians to give up and hand
over their weapons.
In Eastern Ukraine, a One-Building, Pro-Russia Realm Persists Despite Criticism
Photo
A version of the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic hung in an occupied government building.Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
DONETSK,
Ukraine — Nikolai Solntsev, the self-declared commissar of the Eastern
Front and a founding father of the newly proclaimed Donetsk People’s
Republic, has been waiting 22 years, three months and 14 days for this
moment.
That
is the time the former submariner in the Soviet Navy has had to endure
since the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving him without a country he felt
at home in and could serve with pride.
“The
Soviet Union does not exist, but my oath of service remains. I never
took an oath to Ukraine,” Mr. Solntsev said, explaining why he feels no
loyalty to the country where he lives but is ready to serve an imaginary
new nation that nobody, not even Russia, recognizes.
The
Donetsk People’s Republic has no authority outside an 11-story
Ukrainian government building that an unruly Russian-speaking,
club-bearing crowd has occupied since Sunday. It also has no
electricity: The authorities cut that off as soon as the People’s
Republic declared its existence.
It
is a quixotic and, to many here, crackpot project, but one that feeds
on a deep pool of resentment and fear that extends beyond the few
hundred people now holed up in the government building.
On Monday, officials from the United States,
Russia and Britain discussed the growing unrest and violence in the
Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk.
Nobody
really expects the People’s Republic, a revival of the short-lived
Donetsk Republic set up amid the chaos that followed Russia’s 1917
Communist revolution, to last more than a few days.
But
the rifts rooted in language, culture, politics and economics that
created it — and that have dogged Ukraine since its independence in 1991
— show little sign of fading. Nor do the tensions created by the
struggle in Donetsk, about 45 miles from the border with Russia, seem
likely to go away. Late on Wednesday, a group of protesters blocked the
exit of a Ukrainian military site here and forced buses carrying troops
to go back inside.
Mr. Solntsev acknowledged that the People’s Republic, declared on Monday,
faced an uphill struggle. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian government vowed
to end the occupation of the government building within 48 hours, either
through negotiation or force. Even officials in the Party of Regions,
the former governing party of the ousted president, Viktor F.
Yanukovych, denounced the seizure of official premises and called on the
protesters to end their occupation and accept that Donetsk is part of
Ukraine.
The
cluster of fringe pro-Russian political outfits behind the Donetsk
People’s Republic, which the authorities in Kiev denounce as a local
power grab instigated by Moscow, disagree on their final goal. They
cannot decide whether to push to join Russia, to give substance to their
chimerical state or to secure more autonomy for the region within
Ukraine.
But
the People’s Republic does now have a 12-member governing council,
which meets on the 11th floor, Mr. Solntsev said. That space had been
occupied by Donetsk’s Kiev-appointed governor, the billionaire metals
magnate Sergei A. Taruta, who now holds his meetings in a local hotel.
With
the power cut off in the occupied government block, the elevators no
longer work, requiring the portly Mr. Solntsev and his comrades — who
include two newly appointed ministers, one for foreign affairs and one
for security — to climb the stairs past masked men armed with metal rods
and wooden clubs. Mr. Solntsev said he could not remember either
minister’s name.
Far
more important, he said, than the conventional trappings of statehood —
details like territory, laws and functioning services — is “the idea”
of a country that “speaks for the people.” In the case of Donetsk, Mr.
Solntsev said, this means for Russian speakers, who he said felt like
unwanted aliens in a nation that has been dominated by Ukrainian
speakers from the west since the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych, a Donetsk
native, in February.
While
only 4.7 percent of local residents want a separate Donetsk state, just
over a third like to identify themselves as “citizens of Ukraine.” More
prefer “Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine” or “residents of the
Donets Basin,” according to a survey released Wednesday by the Donetsk
Institute for Social Research and Political Analysis.
Igor
Koval, the acting chairman of the Donetsk regional council, complained
that the protesters occupying the administration building had made it
impossible for him to do any work because they would not let him into
the council chamber on the 10th floor. They should leave, Mr. Koval
said. But he added that he understood and shared their anger at “being
treated like second-class citizens” by a national government that “does
not listen to or understand the problems of the east.”
The government installed after Mr. Yanukovych fled the capital on Feb. 21 ended the dominance of Russian-speaking politicians from the east of the country — most of whom had opposed the pro-European protests in Kiev that toppled Mr. Yanukovych — and shifted power sharply to Ukrainian speakers from western and central regions.
State-run
Russian television, which is widely watched here despite efforts by
officials in Kiev to block access, has fanned fears that this shift will
bring discrimination and even persecution by nationalist extremists.
The Ukrainian Parliament contributed to this anxiety by voting in late
February to scrap a law that allows Russian to be used instead of
Ukrainian in schools, courts and elsewhere in regions where it is widely
spoken. The decision was quickly reversed but left fertile grounds for
pro-Russian activists to plant seeds of alarm.
Few
Donetsk residents can cite concrete examples of how life has become
worse as a result of the change of power in Kiev, but opinion polls show
that the eastern regions take a dim view of Ukraine’s new order. A
recent poll
commissioned by the International Republican Institute showed that 72
percent of people in the Russian-speaking east think the country is
going in the wrong direction, compared with only 36 percent in the
Ukrainian-speaking west.
East
and west are also sharply divided on where their future should lie.
Ninety percent of those polled in the west want Ukraine to enter an
economic union with Europe, while 59 percent of easterners want to join a
Russian-led customs union.
Mr.
Solntsev said the People’s Republic had not had time to work out its
own economic policy but would focus on supporting “the working class,
not the bourgeoisie.”
The
lack of a firm policy means that while Mr. Solntsev and his allies have
been able to mimic the tactics of the pro-European protesters in Kiev
by building barricades, tearing up paving stones and setting up
self-defense units, they have failed to rally widespread public support,
particularly from the middle class.
Dmitri
Zhukov, the owner of a restaurant near the seized government building,
watched in disgust as a group of young men with clubs marched by to join
the occupation. “How can we support these people?” he asked. “They
think Uncle Putin will come and give them money. They need to stop
drinking and start working.”
Correction: April 9, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated the rank of Donetsk
among cities in eastern Ukraine. It is the second biggest, not the
biggest (Kharkiv is the biggest).
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