No Russians among Slavyansk self-defense forces - NYT reporters
Self-defense forces in the anti-Kiev stronghold of Slavyansk are Ukrainians, not Russians, who distrust the new regime and the Western powers that support it, New York Times reporters have discovered. The forces also said they are not being paid to fight.
Two New York Times reporters have spent a week in the city of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine, talking to members of the self-defense forces. The journalists visited self-defense checkpoints and observed the forces as they battled Ukrainian troops amid a military assault on the city on Friday.
The resistance fighters of the 12th Company, part of the People’s Self-Defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, deny claims made by Kiev and its Western sponsors that Russia or private tycoons are paying them to fight.
“This is not a job,” one of the activists, Dmitry told the NYT reporters. “It is a service.”
Armed with dated weapons, the self-defense activists said they would have bought new weapons if they had financial support. The NYT journalists reported seeing weapons from the 1980s and 1990s in checkpoints and warehouses.
The activists explained that they purchased some of their weaponry from corrupt Ukrainian soldiers, while taking others from seized police buildings or confiscating them from captured Ukrainian armored vehicles.
“Much of their stock was identical to the weapons seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers and Interior Ministry Special Forces troops at government positions outside the city,” the NYT reporters said in an article published on Saturday.
Read more:
http://rt.com/news/156736-no-russians-ukraine-activists/
= new reply since forum marked as read
If anyone has the stones to come in here.................
They are not a military or paramilitary junta who overthrew the president in a coup. The current president was expressly named on an interim basis. Elections were promptly scheduled. I don't know what more you could ask of in the situation.
Now, there are people in Ukraine who are actually unelected and who are engaging in campaigns of great violence and intimidation of the people. For example, this guy:
Funny how I've never, ever heard you denounce him for the reasons you continuously denounce the interim government.
They're all elected officials, including the interim president and prime minister. The It just so happens that the former president fled the country, and logic demands that an interim president be appointed until elections can be held.
Unelected leaders would include this guy:
As for proof that those crimes were committed by Pro-Russian militants, for starters just google "Simon Ostrovsky." Again, for starters.
Which news outlet and reporter do you read that you find an authority you can trust on reporting the events on the ground there and who is totally informed of the politics and identities of those involved.
And, might you, yourself, have personal bias because you have relatives or a heritage background with Ukraine/Russia that might cloud your opinions in some way? 
Here's our self-identified bearded Russian friend helping a Ukrainian police officer with his retirement plans.
In Slavyansk.
(from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/22/-sp-does-us-evidence-prove-russian-special-forces-are-in-eastern-ukraine)
He's definitely not camera shy.
First off, it's not immediately obvious why that city would be the center of what looks to be the hard liners in the east. More expected would have been Donetsk, where Yanukovich was from, and which is a much bigger place.
But if you look at a map, it's nicely located:
Looks like someone who knows his Che Guevara chose that town to be the center of resistance. It's smack in the middle of the three eastern provinces. That doesn't look, to me, like a spontaneous on-the-ground choice for where to locate the main center for the resistance. It looks much more like a decision made by a military man with the goal of taking those three provinces.
OTOH, I don't doubt that article. There is a lot of on-the-ground support for a movement against Kiev, especially now after what happened in Odessa. Now that the casualty lists are out, from that list we saw that four people were killed by gunshot wounds, which confirms the idea that there was at least a gunfight between the pro-Russians and the pro-Maidans there. All of the victims were from Odessa also. So it looks like everything that happened there was local. No "outside agitators".
Then there's this profile of the protestors in Donetsk: http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2014/04/30/ukraine-one-on-one-with-the-pro-russian-protesters/
Just like the NYT reporters, what these guys found were what very much appears to be local folks who don't like Kiev.
So, my thought is that Slovyansk, just because of its interesting location, does probably have some special forces from Russia involved there. But all those guys are doing is lighting a spark to tinder that's dry and ready.
Avoiding an all-out civil war is by far the best thing for Ukraine, and I think to do that there will have to be concessions from the Kiev gov't to the east for federalization.
There's two realities here:
1. Russia has, from all appearances, figured out that all-out invasion would be far too costly to their international standing for them to risk it. But they know they don't have to invade, because ...
2. ... the other reality is that the western Ukrainians are going to find out that life with the EU isn't all wine and roses, far from it. When that realization hits, the easterners are going to stare over at them and wag their fingers and say "I told you so!" Better for that to happen via elections and all that than via civil war.
It may be hard to swallow that Putin and Lavrov are right about federalization, but they are. It's a peaceful solution to this mess, and the only one that will allow for the hard reality the western Ukrainians are about to face as they start out their life with the West. The goal here has to be to get everyone, including reps from the east, sitting at a table across from each other and negotiating a way out. The alternative is a long and bloody mess.
