Armed Russian agents allegedly involved in east Ukraine gun battles

Gun battles between pro-Russian fighters and Ukrainian security forces on April 13 in the city of Sloviansk in Ukraine’s pro-Russian Donetsk Oblast resulted in the death of an officer with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and five officers injured. The shootings were committed by masked men in green uniforms, without badges identifying their affiliation. They occurred during a local anti-terrorist operation. The unidentified assailants took over the local police headquarters, and shot and injured more than a dozen civilians, including an accredited journalist. They’ve also detained several journalists and stopped them from working.

Russian forces are active on Ukraine’s mainland territory, reported on April 13 Igor Kabalenko, the former first deputy head of the joint chiefs of staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “Those active in Sloviansk and Chervoniy Liman aren’t separatists, but military reconnaissance-sabotage subunits,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “They are aiding the separatists in destabilizing the situation. Is it necessary to ask a rhetorical question: will this continue and spread further?”

Ukrainian intelligence officers have detained on Ukrainian territory several officers with the State Reconnaissance Administration of the Russian Federation, reported on April 14 Andriy Parubiy, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. “What we saw in Sloviansk are terrorists who arrived from abroad,” he said, stressing he’s disturbed that the fighters have used the local civilian population as cannon fodder. “We will neutralize those people who came to Ukraine in order to ignite civil conflict.”

Acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov offered the pro-Russian fighters “significant enhanced authority for local regions and wide reforms in local governance” as a concession, in exchange for them laying down their arms and freeing state buildings by Monday morning. Otherwise, Ukraine will start a massive anti-terrorist operation that will involve special forces and the army, he said. In response, the Russian government labeled Turchynov’s order launching an anti-terrorist operation as “criminal.”

“The self-declared Kyiv government, which was the result of a state overthrow, has taken the course of a forced suppression of people’s protests,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in an April 13 statement. These protests “were a reaction to the complete ignoring of the lawful interests of the residents of the southeastern regions, direct threats and violence against all those who disagree with the efforts of the prevalence of the national-radicals and the chauvinist, Russophobe and anti-Semitic acts of the coalition that has taken over in Kyiv with the direct support of the U.S. and the EU.”

The U.S. State Department issued an April 13 statement alleging the Russian government “continues to spin a false and dangerous narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine.” The statement identified 10 false claims in particular, including Russian agents not being active in Ukraine and that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are under threat. “The Russian propaganda machine continues to promote hate speech and incite violence by creating a false threat in Ukraine that does not exist,” the statement said. “We would not be seeing the violence and sad events that we’ve witnessed this weekend without this relentless stream of disinformation and Russian provocateurs fostering unrest in eastern Ukraine.”

Zenon Zawada: With its actions and statements, the Russian government is aiming to provoke a civil conflict in Ukraine. It’s widely speculated that the Russians are merely raising the stakes ahead of their meeting this week involving the top diplomats of Ukraine, the U.S. and the EU. Yet we think this weekend’s dispatch of armed Russian soldiers is only the start of a prolonged civil conflict in eastern Ukraine, which may result in the Russian occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, at minimum (which will be likely be described by the Russians as the liberation of these regions).

The U.S. has voiced its support for the anti-terrorist operations that are aimed at preventing the spread of pro-Russian instigators and saboteurs into other Ukrainians cities. Their expansion will depend on how easy or difficult the Russian destabilization and possibly takeover of the Donbas region will be.