NATO warned Russia on Tuesday against making an “historic mistake” by provoking a flaring secession crisis in eastern Ukraine that Moscow itself conceded could degenerate into a civil war.
Ukraine’s embattled interim leaders have been waging an uphill battle to keep their culturally splintered nation of 46 million together after last month’s ouster of a pro-Kremlin regime and subsequent loss of Crimea to Russia.
An eery echo of the Black Sea peninsula’s crisis sounded on Sunday when militants stormed a series of strategic Government buildings across a swathe of heavily Russified eastern regions and demanded that Moscow send its troops for support.
Ukraine mounted a counteroffensive on Tuesday by vowing to treat the separatists as ‘terrorists’ and making 70 arrests in a nighttime security sweep aimed at proving the Kremlin’s involvement in the secessionist movement. An urgent deployment of security forces saw Kiev also regain control of an administration building in Kharkiv and the security service headquarters of Donetsk.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said that an unnamed ‘radical’ group was keeping 60 people hostage inside a Government office in the eastern city of luhansk. The Ukrainian Security Service said on Tuesday that ‘separatists’ have the hostages inside a security service branch in luhansk and are threatening them with arms and explosives. Ukraine said the building was seized on Sunday by armed pro-Russian protesters.