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More than 5,000 miners, students and other workers rallied April 17 in Donetsk, Ukraine, in a show of growing opposition in eastern Ukraine to provocations by Moscow-backed forces. Similar actions took place in Luhansk, Kramatorsk and other eastern cities.
Starting April 6, small bands led by armed troops in uniforms without insignia began seizing government administrative buildings and police stations, proclaiming themselves partisans of an independent Donetsk People’s Republic and calling for Russian military intervention. Some 40,000 Russian troops have been deployed along the Ukrainian border since March.
Among the Russian government-organized forces are local “titushkis” — hired lumpen thugs — and small groups of backers of the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin. They’ve been building barricades, stealing arms from government offices, intimidating residents and assaulting supporters of a united Ukraine.
Some workers, particularly members of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine, the country’s largest union, have organized self-defense units to counter the assaults on Ukraine’s sovereignty. In Dnepropetrovsk, for example, some 15 units comprising about 100 volunteer combatants control nine checkpoints at entrances to the city, reported Dmitry Tymchuk, who established the Center of Military and Political Research in Kiev in February to counter Russian government propaganda about Moscow’s invasion of Crimea. He previously served in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
“The people here are saying ‘Enough,’” Mykola Volynko, president of the 12,000-member Independent Miners Union in the eastern Donbass region, told Russia’s opposition TV Rain April 9. “We will build a new Ukraine. … We are defending ourselves, our families, and we want to live in a normal state.”
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