You're reading: ​Ukraine braces for bombings

Ukraine is bracing itself for a wave of terror attacks after a blast in Kharkiv ripped through a EuroMaidan memorial march on Feb. 22, killing four people, including two teenage boys, and wounding nine. The latest in a series of recent bombings, it was the first one to cause fatalities.

Officials and
analysts believe that Russia has moved into a new phase of its
campaign to destabilize the country.

Russia
has started an absolutely cynical practice of organizing terrorist
attacks in Ukrainian cities outside of the anti-terrorist operation
zone,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebyinis
said, attributing the change in tactics to Russia’s lack of a
decisive military breakthrough. “Nervousness in the Kremlin is
clear: the blitzkrieg has failed.”


Four men
accused of carrying out the attack were arrested in its immediate
aftermath, according to Ukraine’s state
security service, the SBU. They had trained in Belgorod, Russia, were
carrying Russian weapons, including a Shmel rocket launcher, and had
planned a series of further attacks, the organization said.

Previous
bombings have caused injuries or killed the bomber, but the blast in
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city with a population of some
1.43 million, is the first to take civilian lives. Ukraine’s
authorities have reported on at least twenty terror plots since
December, four of which they were able to thwart. Independent experts
suggest that these reports are only the tip of the iceberg.

“There
have been a number of reports, but due to the nature of the threats
they [the SBU] do not report all the cases, so that gives you an idea
of the scale of the threat,” said Oleksiy
Melnyk, Director of Foreign Relations and International Security at
the Razumkov Centre, a leading Ukrainian think-tank.


“I’m
afraid the level of threat will remain considerably heightened, it
depends not only on their [terrorist] plans, but on the effectiveness
of our security forces.”

The SBU refused
to comment on the number of groups or plots they were monitoring and
in which cities, but indicated the threat was indeed substantial:

The
answers to your questions are classified information, we can’t tell
you because it would lead to panic in the country,” Olena
Gitlyanska, an SBU spokeswoman, told the Kyiv Post.


They
are all linked to the criminal groups ‘DPR’ and ‘LPR’,” she
added, referring to the self-proclaimed people’s republics of
Donetsk and Luhansk.


The
explosion in Kharkiv occurred as hundreds of marchers were marking
the one-year
anniversary
of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from the country.


According
to the chief of the SBU’s main
investigation department, Vasyl Vovk, a Soviet-made
MON-100 anti-personnel landmine was used in the attack. The device
can be activated by remote or by sensor, and has a blast radius of up
to 115 meters.

Eyewitnesses
believe the explosive device was timed to go off after all the
marchers had arrived on the square, but a delay and a truck moving
ahead of the marchers prevented the bomb taking significantly more
casualties.

“The march
was delayed by 10 minutes, then just as people started to move, we
saw the explosion go off just one hundred meters away, to our left
and on the road side. It seemed like the device was hidden in the
snow near a tree,” Dmitriy Komaykov, one of the march
participants, told the Kyiv Post.

“Luckily a
truck was maneuvering there, and it took most of the shrapnel. I saw
two dead, lying in blood, just next to the truck, which was
completely torn apart by metal shards. Can you imagine if it had been
later? My wife and I went to the march with our baby daughter and our
older son.”

A local
journalist and contributor to Euromaidan PR, Vasiliy Ponomarev, told
the Kyiv Post he had seen at least three people killed.

“I heard
an explosion but thought at first it was a banger, then I looked in
that direction and saw people start to fall,” he said. “Thirty
steps from me I saw a man with his head smashed, covered in blood. He
was dead.”

“Another
was lying on the ground and medics rushed to resuscitate him. They
couldn’t. Three ambulances arrived, one took another guy who was
bleeding, his guts were ripped open. They put him in an ambulance but
they had no defibrillator. Eventually he died too.”

The
SBU’s
Vasyl
Vovk acknowledged that the incident had exposed shortcomings with the
country’s anti-terrorist operation, but stressed that work was
being done to address them. In doing so, he gave a number of clues as
to where future terrorist attacks might take place.


We’re
correcting plans to fight terrorist threats, involving more and more
counter-terrorist experts to work in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson,
Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia,” Vovk said.


Odesa has so
far been the focus of terrorist activities, with at least nine
reported incidents.

“All
these groups are connected to terrorist organisations in DNR/LNR,
which as we know have instructions from Russian Federation,” said
independent security expert Oleksiy Melnyk.


“Most
of the attacks take place in Odesa and Kharkiv. They are, at least,
trying to maintain tensions in these regions – a general atmosphere
of unrest, so that they can then seize the opportunity when it
arises. A constant underlying threat creates the opportunity for more
active actions in future.”