Paramilitaries seize Donetsk rebels’ HQ
By Courtney Weaver in Donetsk and Roman Olearchyk in Kiev
Scores of heavily armed paramilitaries stormed the Donetsk headquarters of Ukraine’s pro-Russia separatists on Thursday, kicking out rebel leaders and announcing a new order in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.
Armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles, the camouflage-dressed commandos seized the building around midday, forcefully evicting the dozens of separatists who have been working and living inside the building for several weeks.
The takeover signals a change of power within the separatist movement after weeks of infighting between its various political and military leaders.
The move appears to be an attempt by separatists with closer ties to Moscow to assert control over an increasingly unruly rebellion. It was welcomed by Alexander Borodai, the republic’s new self-appointed prime minister and former Russian security consultant. He was also active in Crimea immediately before Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. Pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine have escalated the political turmoil that threatens to tear the country apart
The men, who identified themselves as members of the Vostok Battalion, a pro-Russia militia group, began to dismantle the rebels’ barricades, including the anti-EU and anti-western posters that had covered them. By mid-afternoon they were leading western journalists on tours of the building, gleefully kicking down locked doors, showing off the previous leaders’ loot and letting reporters freely rustle through the republic’s documents.
The commandos insisted they were also separatists, who despised the Kiev “junta” and wanted to see eastern Ukraine either staying independent or becoming part of Russia. While most of the men said they were from the Donetsk region, some appeared to be speaking Ossetian, implying that they were from the Russian north Caucasus or South Ossetia, the breakaway Georgian republic.
The Vostok Battalion is one of several pro-Russian paramilitaries that have been taking part in the fighting in east Ukraine. Formed in early May, it is run by Alexander Khodаkovsky, the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s security service.
Mr Khodakovsky has been working under the leadership of a Russian citizen, Igor Grishkin, who goes by the pseudonym Strelkov and is running the separatists’ military operation in Slavyansk. The Kiev government says Mr Grishkin is a Russian military intelligence officer.
The abrupt change in leadership left many of the previous pro-Russia separatist leaders confused.
Vostok Battalion has besieged the DPR HQ
Sergei Babryshnykov, a lawmaker serving in the self-declared republic’s legislature, said the takeover appeared to be an internal coup but warned that it could be an attempt to sabotage the republic. “I can’t say myself who this operation is against, or what it is for. Many members of the republic are disturbed by this.”
However, the takeover could also be an attempt to transform the Donetsk People’s Republic from a haphazard movement into a sleek military operation, better prepared to defend itself against Kiev.
The violence in eastern Ukraine appears to be intensifying. A Ukrainian helicopter was shot down by separatists in Slavyansk on Thursday, killing 14 military personnel.
Members of the Vostok Battalion depicted the takeover as an emergency measure after a sharp rise in separatist looting and crime, as well as disorder within the leadership.
Over the past few weeks the rebels’ headquarters had grown to look, and smell, more like a rubbish dump, with discarded food and beer bottles littering the halls and an unsightly barricade outside built with tyres, timber and scrap metal and adorned by barbed wire.
And there go the barricades of the Donetsk People's Republic...
“We had such a beautiful city . . . what the hell is this?” said one armed member of the Vostok Battalion, as bulldozers began dismantling the barricades beside him.
Vostok members said some of the separatists had looted an entire hypermarket during a Ukrainian military air strike this week, the spoils of which – coffee, hot dogs, Snickers, cigarettes – were scattered liberally throughout the building.
“The people who were representing our republic were not respectable,” Adik, another member of the battalion, said. He suggested that while some of the previous leadership would be allowed to stay within the movement, many would not.
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