No new hot spots emerge in Ukraine last weekend

The Ukrainian government has organized a second round table talk for a peaceful solution of the Ukrainian crisis in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv scheduled for May 17. Alike in the the first talks, held in Kyiv on May 14, representatives of the government and eastern regions found no compromise, and they have decided to meet one more time for new discussions. Representatives of the Donetsk and Luhansk local parliaments have asked for the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) to stop and to grant their regions the status of “federal units”. PM Arseniy Yatesnyuk and Ukraine’s first President, Leonid Kravchuk, who moderated talks, have accused representatives of the eastern regions of surrendering to self-proclaimed “leaders” and of being unable to cope with violence. 

The ATO continued in the hottest cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and official representatives have reported visible progress in fighting with terrorists this weekend. Both the ATO and the terrorist sides report on the significant demotivation of the terrorists. There were no new hot points on the map of Donestk and Luhansk regions during the weekend, but still lot of violence has been observed there. Numerous reports on the kidnapping and murdering of people were present in the mass media. On May 18, a power transformer station of the Stakhaniv Ferroalloy Plant (Luhansk region) was damaged which stopped power supply to the plant. 

The ATO forces arrested a number of gunmen in Kramatorsk which were establishing an emplacement for a portable missile system, two of them were journalists of Russian pro-Putin media LifeNews, Informational Resistance analytical portal reported on May 19. The Russian External Affairs Ministry reacted fiercely, appealing to the OSCE leader, and demanding the immediate release of the “media representatives”. The same day, a Ukrainian journalist Osman Pashayev and his five friends and colleagues were arrested by a “self-defense” squad belonging to the self-proclaimed prime-minister in Crimea; they were released after being tortured. 

In Crimea, the local government banned Crimean Tatars from meeting on May 18 to commemorate the 70-th anniversary of their deportation. The central square of Simferopol (the main city of Crimea), where people used to gather for commemoration, was cordoned off by Russian police. People gathered in the outskirt of Simferopol, where their leaders announced their intention to create a Crimean Tatar national autonomy. According to BBC reports, Russian helicopters flew above the places where Crimean Tatars gathered, to drown out the speakers voices.