Eyewitnesses to the carnage that killed at least 46 people in Odessa, including 38 in an arson fire, say that many of the pro-Russian separatists were armed with automatic rifles and pistols and started shooting at an unarmed, pro-Ukraine rally that preceded a football game.
Zoya Kazandzhy, a journalist and local activist, said that police did not help, so citizens defended themselves from the attack.
“Citizens organized quickly themselves and that’s the only thing that helped us yesterday, because police were helpless,” Kazandzhy says, referring to the bloody standoff between local soccer fans who marched in the city center and pro-Russian activists that started at 3 p.m. and ended overnight on May 2-3.
“The soccer fans were unarmed – they were marching with Ukrainian flags, while the opposite side appeared fully geared as if they came for war,” Kazandzhy said, who witnessed the events, saying the pro-Russian camp had pistols, clubs and shields and started firing on the crowd.
Of the 46 deaths, eight took place in clashes between Kremlin-backed vigilantes and the pro-Ukrainian crowd while the rest took place after an arson fire set in the trade unions house where the pro-Russian crowd fled.
How the fire started is under investigation as well as who instigated the violence. Authorities reported that 15 of the dead were Russian citizens and another five killed were from Moldova’s Kremlin-backed breakaway region of Transnistria.
In the aftermath, on the morning of May 3, Ksenia Prokonova, an Odessa-based activist, was seeking help for injured or detained pro-Ukrainian demonstrators. Prokonova, who was an
active EuroMaidan supporter, says it’s important that volunteers provide security
at area hospitals because “there are no coordination centers in Odessa like
there were in Kyiv’s EuroMaidan.” Currently most of the
injured are in at least three Odessa hospitals.
Like everyone else, Prokonova was concerned that the situation in the city may escalate in the upcoming days.
A group of Kyiv officials — including the leader of Batkivshyna Party, Yulia Tymoshenko, presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko and the
leader of the nationalist Svoboda Party Oleh Tiahnybok — arrived in Odessa to support
the families of killed activists and help ease tensions.
Today, around 300 pro-Russian activists gathered outside the burned trade union building,
according to Kazandzhy. They took the
Ukrainian flag from the building and set it on fire.
“However, there were
mostly elderly women who came there,” Kazandzhy says, adding that now they have information that pro-Russian
activists are going to march to the local police office, which makes the
citizens “nervous.”
Ukraine’s Interior
Minister Arsen Avakov dismissed Petro Lutsyuk who headed the Odesa Interior
Ministry on May 3.
Now the pro-Ukrainian activists
fear being persecuted by Russian separatists because most of the activists сan be
“easily identified.”
“Pro-Russian activists
who organized yesterday’s disorder in the city center started hunting for
EuroMaidan activists. And we need to provide the security ourselves, all the
checkpoints in and out the city is on alert,” Kazandzhy says, adding that police doesn’t make much
progress investigating the cases of Russian-backed separatists.
However, the police report that around
130 people were detained on May 3.
“Our citizens just
want to feel safe on the streets of their city and those who wants to go to
Russia – are free to go there,” Kazandzhy adds.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
