Tally of persons kidnapped by Russian-backed insurgents in Ukraine’s east grows to 16
Source: Kyiv Post
Sixteen persons, including journalists, have been kidnapped over the past week in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Sloviansk and Horlivka, according to Kyiv Post reporting and that of Donetsk-based news website Novosti Donbassa. Some have been released while two have been found dead.
The following is a list of the 16 persons and the details of each case.
April 23 – Sloviansk City Councilman Vadym Sukhonos was abducted by Kremlin-backed militants, reports TSN television channel, citing local media in the Donetsk Oblast. Sukhonos apparently was kidnapped for ideological reasons. In February, he quit the Party of Regions, the dominant party in eastern Ukraine, and is now a local independent lawmaker.
April 22 – In Sloviansk, the bodies of two men were found near the river Torets with signs of torture, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. One of them has been identified as Volodymyr Rybak, a Horlivka city councilman believed to have been kidnapped on April 17. He was found with a sandbag tied around his body and a slash across his stomach. He is believed to have drowned in the river while unconscious. According to the ministry’s reports, members of the pro-Russian separatist group who seized the city’s security services building were involved in the alleged torture and murder of the two men.
Volodymyr Rybak, a Horlivka city councilman.
April 22 – Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, the self-proclaimed mayor of Sloviansk in northern Donetsk Oblast confirmed that unidentified people in uniform had captured Vice News journalist Simon Ostrovsky, an American, who was last seen early morning on April 22. Stella Khorosheva, a spokeswoman for the pro-Russian militants in the eastern city told the Associated Press on Wednesday that Ostrovsky was being held at the local branch of the Ukrainian Security Service that pro-Russian militiamen seized more than a week ago. Khorosheva told the news agency that Ostrovsky is "fine" and is "suspected of bad activities" but refused to explain. She added that the pro-Russian group is conducting an investigation into Ostrovsky’s activities.
Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/tally-of-persons-kidnapped-by-russian-backed-insurgents-in-ukraines-east-grows-to-16-update-344798.html
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There was no general uprising.
There was no Ukrainian overreaction. That may be considered a virtue, but considering that they have been nearly demilitarized by pro-Russian governments in the past and recently had to hold a fund-raiser to support operations, it might be necessity.
In most cities, the takeovers were ended or ignored without notable public support.
The only exceptions are several cities in a triangle about 50 miles on a side, from Slavyansk to Luhansk to Horlivka. I've found it not easy to know the population in that area exactly, but it's on the order of 700,000 to 1M people. We can presume this is the area of greatest Russian support. A couple of polls indicate only about 25% Russian/separatist support there. It's a surprisingly old population demographically; I'd say about 90,000 potential pro-Russian supporters in that triangle. Ukrainian population is ~46M, 4.3M in the entire Donetsk Oblast.
At most about 2500 have protested at any one time by any account. A counter-protest(have forgotten where though, Slavyansk or nearby, that's nervy) had nearly as many.
In a recent protest, it looked like this in Donetsk:
RIA Novosti reported the area "being swept by protest", including Kharkiv(pop. 1.4M). The Governor was attacked there and a building briefly taken. This is what the protest segment looked like:
Finally, turning to kidnappings, robbery, random destruction, intimidation of the press, is a sign of loss of discipline and direction of the pro-Russian forces.
If it is a Putin fail, that's good news; the bad news is, that after each of the continuous but failed attempts to control Ukraine and derail the EU/AA success (sorry, it's not about the US, NATO, or cookies) since 2003 or so, he has escalated to a more desperate and clumsy tactic.
