Armed pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine said yesterday they were not bound by an international deal ordering them to disarm and would not move out of public buildings they have seized until the Kiev government stepped down.
The agreement, brokered by the United States, Russia, Ukraine and the European Union in Geneva on Thursday, seemed to be the best hope of defusing a stand-off in Ukraine that has dragged East-West relations to their lowest level since the Cold War.
Ukraine’s acting president and Prime Minister offered some of their strongest pledges yet to strengthen constitutional rights to use the Russian language to try and defuse the protests but Kiev also said its efforts to root out the separatists would continue.
The Geneva agreement requires all illegal armed groups to disarm and end occupations of public buildings, streets and squares, but with the separatists staying put in the east and Ukrainian nationalist protesters showing no sign of leaving their –unarmed – camps in the capital’s Maidan Square, it was not clear that either side would be willing to move first.
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Enacting the agreement on the ground will be difficult, because of the deep mistrust between the pro-Russian groups and the Western-backed government in Kiev.
This week has already seen several people killed in violent clashes.
The fact a deal was reached in Geneva came as a surprise, and it was not clear what had happened behind the scenes to persuade the Kremlin, which had shown little sign of compromise, to join calls on the militias to disarm. It rejects Ukrainian and Western accusations of orchestrating the gunmen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin overturned decades of post-Cold War diplomacy last month by declaring Russia had a right to intervene in neighbouring countries and by annexing Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.
That move followed the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych after months of street protests prompted by his rejection of a trade deal with the EU. Meanwhile In Slaviansk, a city that has become a flashpoint in the crisis after men with Kalashnikovs took control last weekend, leaders of the pro-Russian groups met inside one of the seized buildings to decide how to respond to the Geneva agreement.
Anatoly, one of the armed separatists who have taken over police headquarters, said: “We are not leaving the building, regardless of what statements are made, because we know what is the real situation in the country and we will not leave until our commander tells us to.”
Two Ukrainian military aircraft circled Slaviansk several times yesterday. In front of the mayor’s office, men armed with automatic rifles peered over sandbags that had been piled higher overnight. Separatists remained in control of the city’s main streets, searching cars at checkpoints around the city.
In a joint televised address, acting President Oleksander Turchinov and Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk called for national unity, urged people to refrain from violence and said they would support constitutional change, decentralising more power to local councils, including over their official language – a key demand of Russian-speakers.
Kiev also said the government was preparing a law that would give the separatists an amnesty if they backed down.
The self-declared leader of all the region’s separatists said he did not consider his men to be bound by the agreement.
Denis Pushilin, head of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, told journalists in Donetsk, the regional capital, that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “did not sign anything for us; he signed on behalf of the Russian Federation”.
First, he said, the Prime Minister and acting president who took power in February should quit their offices, as they took them over “illegally”.