500 Separatists Storm Border Post in Eastern Ukraine
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The rebels attacked the building in Luhansk in an effort to open the
border with Russia to receive forces and supplies, a government
spokesman said.
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DONETSK,
Ukraine — Hundreds of separatist fighters attacked a district border
control headquarters in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk on Monday
in the largest battle against the country’s border protection forces
since unrest in the east began. A government spokesman said the action
appeared to be aimed at seizing control of the border with Russia to
open it to forces and supplies.
The
attack in Luhansk, Ukraine’s easternmost province, began at 4 a.m. and
fighting was still raging at noon. Oleg Slobodyan, a spokesman for the
Ukrainian state border service, said about 500 rebels had stormed the
district headquarters building in the Mirny neighborhood, using
automatic weapons and rocket launchers with snipers posted in nearby
apartment buildings.
Five
rebels were killed and eight wounded, Mr. Slobodyan said, though there
was no independent confirmation of that count. Seven border guards were
injured, he added.
The
attack was a deeply troubling sign for Ukraine’s new government, whose
president elect, Petro O. Poroshenko, has pledged to crush the
separatist movement in the country’s east. That promise may prove
difficult to keep, particularly in the lawless areas of southeastern
Luhansk, where separatists control large swaths of territory that have
become combat zones for Ukrainian forces.
The
assault also raised the question of how strong the central government’s
forces are in the east, where many members of the police and other
state security forces have either melted away or joined the rebels.
Border guards are one of the few forces left in eastern Ukraine, but are
not particularly practiced in combat.
“We’re
doing the best we can,” Mr. Slobodyan said, “but our mission was never
intended to be one that repelled large armed attacks.”
Mr.
Slobodyan said the border guard force was holding its own and had asked
for reinforcements from the Ukrainian military but that none had come.
He
said that Monday’s attack was the fourth large assault on border patrol
installations in recent weeks although there have been dozens of
smaller shootouts with border guards as separatists seek to bring in
weapons and other supplies from Russia.
As
for the reason for Monday’s attack, he said, “we can only guess, but we
think that they want to take this branch in order to disrupt the
communication and cooperation for many smaller border stations in the
region,” which he said were controlled by this headquarters.
The
rebels gave a different view of the fight, saying that their forces
were battling members of the ultranationalist Ukrainian group Pravy
Sektor and the National Guard, a quasi-governmental force that includes
many of the so-called defenders of Maidan who were part of the protests
in Kiev that toppled the government this year.
According
to an account from the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, citing the press
service of the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, several hundred
armed men took up positions around the border patrol building and began
shooting at around 4 a.m. It was not clear who the men were, but the
agency characterized the fight as being between Ukrainian nationalist
radicals and central government forces.
It
also said that the Ukrainian military had sent a fighter jet to defend
the building. Mr. Slobodyan acknowledged that a jet had been dispatched,
but he said it flew over without taking action because the fighting was
taking place in a residential area.
The
agency said the border division in Luhansk was responsible for about
460 miles of the frontier with Russia and included dozens of different
districts.
The
Luhansk region has drawn less attention than its separatist neighbor to
the southwest, Donetsk, with fewer reports of fighting. But that could
be in part because much of the border area in southern Luhansk is
largely controlled by rebels and has few outposts of government forces,
other than a smattering of border guards.
The
Russian border has always been relatively porous there. Destitution and
joblessness in the area have driven a lively smuggling business, and
last year an illegal diesel-fuel pipeline was discovered.
In
one smaller recent attack, a shootout in the tiny village of Dyakovo on
Friday left four border guards wounded, according to a border guard
commander who would identify himself only as Vasily Vasilievich.
Fighters attacked a border guard building where guns seized at the
border were being stored, he said in an interview on Saturday outside a
hospital in Amrosivka, where the guards were being treated. He said he
had arrived in March as part of reinforcements for the area.
While
at least parts of the Donetsk region’s border with Russia are under the
central government’s control, with Ukrainian soldiers standing watch in
small, tense checkpoints like those near Amrosivka, it is not clear how
far into Luhansk that control extends.
In
further evidence of the power of armed groups in Ukraine’s troubled
east, armed men in Donetsk entered the editorial offices of two
newspapers, Donbas, and Vecherny Donetsk, and led away the away the
senior editors. It was unclear where the men were taken.
Outside
the newspapers’ headquarters, a grey Soviet-era building with small,
creaking elevators, employees of another small paper, Panorama, stood in
the parking lot packing computers, keyboards and large boxes of files
into the trunks of two cars as it started to rain. They had not been
visited by the armed men but were not taking any chances.
“Just in case,” said a red-haired copy editor in a black dress jacket, Victoria Zaitseva. “Who knows what will happen.”
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