You're reading: Media: National Guard, Kherson battalion troops beat Crimean blockade activists (UPDATED)

About 100 Ukrainian National Guard troops and soldiers from the Kherson Battalion have beaten a group of activists enforcing an unofficial blockade of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory of Crimea, Ukrainian media reported on Nov. 21.

The troops were reported to have surrounded a group of
activists near the town of Chaplynka, at the site of some high-voltage power
line pylons reported to have been damaged by explosions in the early hours of
Nov. 20.

According to Shevket Namatullaev, a journalist of the
Crimean Tatar television channel ATR, the armed troops were beating the
activists away from the area with their rifle butts. He said several Crimean
Tatar activists had been injured.

“According to witnesses, several of the Crimean Tatars
were injured. The security forces did not shoot, but hit the (activists) with
rifle butts, including the women,” Namatullaev wrote on Facebook.

He said more Crimean Tatars from Kherson Oblast were
continuing to arrive at the scene.

According to the spokeswoman of the National Guard of Ukraine, Svitlana Pavlovska, the National Guard has yet to arrive in the area. However, she said that the guardsmen had been ordered by the Interior Ministry to provide security while the power pylons are being repaired.

In accordance with the Interior Ministry leadership’s decision, the National Guard has been sent to secure areas, along with the national police and other law enforcement agencies, where electrical supply lines were damaged in order to ensure and provide security while they’re being repaired,” Pavlovska told the Kyiv Post by phone.

“The National Guard hasn’t arrived yet to those areas. It has no orders that are related to the so-called blockade / roadblock of Crimea from the mainland,” she added.

Officials say the damage to the electricity pylons could
threaten the power supply to 40 percent of Kherson and Mykolayiv oblasts,
Ukrainian television channel 24 Kanal reported.

Crimean Tatar activists, along with fighters from the ultra-nationalist
Right Sector organization, have been blockading the Russian-occupied Crimean
peninsula for several weeks, preventing heavy goods vehicles from entering the
annexed Ukrainian territory.

The activists have also demanded that Ukraine cut the supply
of power to the peninsula. Crimea gets most of its power supply from mainland Ukraine
– up to 1,500 MW of electricity per day. The peninsula itself only has
generating capacity of 180-190 MW per day.

Kyiv Post editor Euan MacDonald can be reached at
[email protected]. Kyiv Post editor Mark Rakhkevych contributed to this report.