Monday, June 02, 2014 3:03:50 AM
France's Le Pen says she admires Putin as much as Merkel - magazine
Marine Le Pen, France's National Front political party head, arrives at a news conference at the European Parliament in Brussels May 28, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir
By Michelle Martin
Sun Jun 1, 2014 5:43pm IST
BERLIN (Reuters) - Marine Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front, said she admired Vladimir Putin as much as German Chancellor Angela Merkel because the Russian president did not allow other countries to impose decisions on him.
Le Pen's anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic party scored its first nationwide poll victory in European elections last week and has since said it is close to forming a political group in the European Parliament.
In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, Le Pen said she had respect for leaders who defended their country's interests and added that Merkel's policies were good for Germany, though they would hurt others.
"I think (Putin) puts the interests of Russia and the Russian people first so in this regard I have the same amount of respect for him as for Ms Merkel," she said in the interview.
"A lot of things are said about Russia because for years it has been demonised on U.S. orders. It should be one of the great characteristics of a European country to form its own opinion and not to see everything from the perspective of the U.S."
On Wednesday Le Pen's party struck a deal with four other Eurosceptic parties - Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party, Italy's Northern League, Austria's Freedom Party and Belgium's Vlaams Belang party. To form a faction, parties must have at least 25-30 members elected in at least seven EU member states.
Le Pen said she was optimistic the National Front could forge a bloc with other parties in the European Parliament.
"I've got a whole series of meetings soon," she said.
Asked if she would like to work with the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), she said: "It would be possible. We have the same fundamental position on Europe."
UKIP leader Nigel Farage has, however, ruled out working with France's National Front. "They come from a different political family," he told the BBC in an interview. "We want nothing to do with that party at all."
On whether the National Front would work with the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD), Le Pen said: "They have not expressed any such wish up until now. We share certain views with the AfD but it's a popular party - it's an elite one and it has a completely different structure."
Asked if she saw her party getting to the second round of a national presidential election in 2017, Le Pen said that was a "very credible hypothesis" and added that her party had at last as much potential among non-voters as among voters.
"I believe that we'll get into power in the next ten years - perhaps more quickly than some people imagine," she said.
Calling the 28-nation EU a "big disaster, an anti-democratic monster", she said she wanted to destroy the EU but not Europe.
"I want to stop it getting fatter, continuing to breathe, touching everything with its paws and reaching into all areas of our legislation with its tentacles," she said, adding people were allowing their right to self-determination to be stolen.
She said Germany had become the Europe's economic powerhouse "because our leaders are weak" but said its neighbour should never forget that France was the "political heart" of Europe.
She said a strong euro was ruining France and leaving the single currency bloc would represent "an incredible opportunity" for France, which she said was on the way to "underdevelopment".
Le Pen denied her party was xenophobic, saying she did not hate anyone but she added that France, where the number of unemployed rose to a record in April, could no longer afford immigration. She said France needed to save on its welfare system "which gives our citizens the same protection as illegal immigrants".
(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Rosalind Russell)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/01/uk-france-lepen-idINKBN0EC1FZ20140601 [no comments yet]
--
Silvio Berlusconi - exclusive interview - Newsnight
Published on May 20, 2014 by BBC Newsnight [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6o-wWU-v2ClFMwougmK7dA ]
Jeremy Paxman speaks to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his villa outside Milan.
WARNING: Contains explicit language [starting at 3:05].
Follow @BBCNewsnight on Twitter
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight
Like BBC Newsnight on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/bbcnewsnight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlsX3BegCkE [comments disabled]
--
Most Russian Troops Leaving Ukraine Border, Officials Report
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Posted: 05/29/2014 10:04 pm EDT Updated: 05/29/2014 10:59 pm EDT
ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (AP) — U.S. defense officials said Thursday that Russia has pulled most of its forces away from the Ukraine border, a withdrawal that the U.S. has been demanding for weeks.
They said about seven battalions remained, amounting to a couple of thousand troops. U.S. officials had estimated as many as 40,000 Russian forces had been aligned along the border with a restive eastern Ukraine that has been wracked with violence between government security forces and pro-Russian separatists.
The defense officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the precise numbers.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel didn't provide any details to reporters traveling with him at the start of a 12-day overseas trip, but he called the withdrawal promising.
"They are not where they need to be and won't be until all of their troops that they positioned along that border a couple of months ago are gone," Hagel said.
"We do know that thousands of Russian troops have been pulled back and are moving away. But we also know that there are still thousands of Russian troops still there that have not yet moved," Hagel said.
Hagel said he has not spoken to his Russian counterpart about the withdrawal.
Hagel was among Obama administration officials who expressed new concerns Thursday about rising violence in eastern Ukraine, including the downing of a military helicopter by pro-Russian rebels.
The White House and State Department both said a de-escalation of the crisis was imperative and called on Russia to exert pressure on the separatists to get them to end the fighting and release a group of international monitors who have been detained in eastern Ukraine since earlier this week.
"We are disturbed by the ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine," presidential spokesman Jay Carney said at the White House. While the U.S. has not been able to verify what happened to the helicopter, he said, "We are concerned that this indicates separatists continue to have access to advanced weaponry and other assistance from the outside."
Ukraine's acting president said earlier Thursday that 12 troops died when rebels shot down a military helicopter in Slovyansk using a portable air defense missile.
Even before the incident, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on Wednesday to reiterate U.S. concerns about the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, the State Department said.
Kerry raised with Lavrov reports of Chechen fighters crossing into Ukraine to join the separatists, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at the State Department.
Kerry "pressed Foreign Minister Lavrov to end all support for separatists, denounce their actions and call on them to lay down their arms," she said.
"Our broad view, as you know, is that de-escalation is the proper path forward," Psaki added, although she said she was not aware of concerns that Ukrainian security forces were using disproportionate means to quell the fighting as some Russians have alleged.
Carney and Psaki also said it was unacceptable that insurgents have detained four observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They demanded their immediate release.
The U.S. has called on Russia repeatedly to help de-escalate tensions in Ukraine, including withdrawing troops massed near Ukraine.
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2014 Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/29/russia-ukraine_n_5414736.html [with comments]
--
More foreign fighters break cover among Ukraine separatists
Pro-Russian rebels of the Battalion Vostok take positions outside the local administration building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, May 29, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Yannis Behrakis/Files
By Gabriela Baczynska
Sun Jun 1, 2014 8:57pm IST
DONETSK Ukraine (Reuters) - In flak jackets and mismatched camouflage fatigues, men from eastern Ukraine, Russia and Ossetia cleaned their weapons side by side in a former Ukrainian army base, now the headquarters of a separatist militia in the city of Donetsk.
Battalion Vostok - or the East Battalion - is a heavily armed, well-organised fighting group that has burst onto the scene in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east and appears to be seeking to lead the fight to prise the region from Kiev and merge it with Russia.
The group encountered at the former Ukrainian base included a total of at least five fighters from the Russian Caucasus region of North Ossetia and from a Russian-backed enclave of Georgia.
They acknowledged they had been fighting alongside Chechens from Russia's former rebellious region of Chechnya, but these, they said, had now gone home.
The presence of fighters from Russia and other parts of former Soviet space is likely to feature prominently in talks this week when Ukraine's President-elect, Petro Poroshenko, meets U.S. President Barack Obama and later, possibly, Russia's Vladimir Putin.
"The split of the country is final. There is nothing uniting us with them (the Kiev leadership) now," Alexander Khodakovsky, a defector from the Ukrainian state security service who now commands Battalion Vostok, told Reuters.
"Kiev has already understood that they have lost south-eastern Ukraine, that it is a sphere of Russian influence, and one way or another it will remain so," said the 41-year-old.
The men of Battalion Vostok see Russia as the heart of their own civilisation and values, irreconcilable with the pro-Western course taken by the Ukrainian authorities.
Kiev denounces them as terrorists and accuses Russia of supporting the rebellion in the east, where separatists have proclaimed independent "people's republics" and where scores of rebel fighters died in clashes with Ukraine's army in May.
Composed and relaxed, Khodakovsky strikes a sharp contrast with many of his men - taciturn and hiding their faces behind balaclavas - who fought the heaviest battles with the Ukrainian army around Donetsk city airport and in the village of Karlovka this month.
For him, the conflict is part of a global standoff between Russia and the United States in a bipolar world, more than two decades after Ukraine took its independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Technically, we have been an independent country, but the borders were only a formality, and we could go on feeling ourselves part of Russia," he said.
"We do not want to be against Russia, and if we are allied with the European Union and NATO, we would automatically be. We made our choice."
Moscow denies involvement in the conflict that threatens to tear Ukraine apart and has dragged ties between Russia and the West to their lowest since the Cold War.
The Kiev leadership says Russian border authorities could do far more to stop these armed groups crossing into eastern Ukraine.
Violence in the east intensified in the run-up to the May 25 election in Ukraine in which a first round win by Poroshenko, a confectionery magnate, gave the signal for a Ukrainian military offensive against the separatists.
FOREIGN FIGHTERS
Foreign fighters at the Battalion Vostok base in the north-eastern part of Donetsk, a city of 1 million people, gave various reasons for joining the separatists defending the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic".
"My personal motivation is the religion, protecting Orthodox Christianity from the West," said Oleg, nicknamed Mamay, from North Ossetia, a Russian region on the northern rim of the Caucasus mountains.
Just south of his homeland is South Ossetia, a Russia-dependent breakaway region of Georgia, which is populated by the same, mostly Orthodox ethnic group as the northern part.
In 2008, Moscow and Tbilisi fought a brief war over South Ossetia, which Russia now considers an independent state, though it is unrecognised internationally.
"In 2008 they were killing us and the Russians saved us. I came here to pay my dues to them," said a South Ossetian man with skin damage that made it difficult to assess his age.
Oleg - stout, black-haired and bearded, carrying a flak jacket and a short machine gun on his arm - said there were 15 Ossetians, including himself, fighting in the ranks of Battalion Vostok around the Donetsk airport on May 26-27.
He and other Vostok fighters said their casualties included one native of Chechnya, a region of Russia where Moscow fought two separatist wars and which is now run by a Kremlin appointee Ramzan Kadyrov, who runs his own militia, or "Kadyrovtsy".
"There are no Chechens now. There were. They left yesterday (on Thursday) with their injured and killed. There was only one casualty among the Chechens," Khodakovsky said. "They were volunteers, not Kadyrovtsy."
Echoing Moscow's denials of involvement, Kadyrov says he has not sent his men to fight in eastern Ukraine but that some have apparently gone of their own accord.
The separatist leader Denis Pushilin said after the battle for the airport, which is now controlled by the Ukrainian army, that the bodies of "volunteers" from Russia would be returned home, openly acknowledging involvement from across the border.
Battalion Vostok fighters also said their comrades included a few from the states of former Soviet Central Asia.
Khodakovsky said he had some 1,000 men in his unit now and that some more "volunteers" were coming, with experience of state security structures or the army.
The unit started gaining shape in early May as blood was drawn in the southeastern city ports of Odessa and Mariupol in clashes between pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainian protesters as well as the law enforcement bodies.
MIXED ALLEGIANCES
Until mid-March, Khodakovsky used to head the elite special unit "Alfa" in his native Donetsk region, a senior and prestigious role in the state security service.
He says his shift was gradual, from rejection of the interim authorities brought to power in Kiev by street protests that in February ousted the former president, Moscow ally Viktor Yanukovich, to an all-out rejection of being part of Ukraine.
Battalion Vostok is one of multiple armed groups fighting on the pro-Russian side in the east, with blurred command and coordination lines and different priorities.
The unit has shown signs recently of flexing its muscles and acting against some other separatists whom Battalion Vostok denounces as looters.
Khodakovsky, who is also responsible for state security in the separatist republic's "government", sides with another armed unit called Oplot and the separatist's "prime minister" Alexander Boroday, who publicly admits to being a Muscovite.
"Some Moscow politicians finance their own people in our government; that is an inevitable necessity," he said, without giving details.
He dismissed Pushilin, leader of the "Donetsk People's Republic", as just a figurehead and admitted he had no illusions as to Moscow's immediate goals in Ukraine's east.
"I think Russia uses us to pursue its geo-political interests, have a buffer between itself and the West. We do not deceive ourselves about that. But even knowing this, we stick to Russia because it is our culture," he said.
The rebels have now taken positions deeper into Donetsk, an industrial hub, setting up barricades and posts in residential areas in the hope that Ukraine's army would not fight in a densely populated area and endanger the urban infrastructure.
"We have no other option," Khodakovsky said. "They should understand the consequences of fighting within a city if Poroshenko wants to go down in history as 'The Bloody One'."
(Additional reporting by Sabina Zawadzki, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Richard Balmforth and Will Waterman)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/01/uk-ukraine-crisis-vostok-idINKBN0EC1MZ20140601
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Marine Le Pen, France's National Front political party head, arrives at a news conference at the European Parliament in Brussels May 28, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir
By Michelle Martin
Sun Jun 1, 2014 5:43pm IST
BERLIN (Reuters) - Marine Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front, said she admired Vladimir Putin as much as German Chancellor Angela Merkel because the Russian president did not allow other countries to impose decisions on him.
Le Pen's anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic party scored its first nationwide poll victory in European elections last week and has since said it is close to forming a political group in the European Parliament.
In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, Le Pen said she had respect for leaders who defended their country's interests and added that Merkel's policies were good for Germany, though they would hurt others.
"I think (Putin) puts the interests of Russia and the Russian people first so in this regard I have the same amount of respect for him as for Ms Merkel," she said in the interview.
"A lot of things are said about Russia because for years it has been demonised on U.S. orders. It should be one of the great characteristics of a European country to form its own opinion and not to see everything from the perspective of the U.S."
On Wednesday Le Pen's party struck a deal with four other Eurosceptic parties - Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party, Italy's Northern League, Austria's Freedom Party and Belgium's Vlaams Belang party. To form a faction, parties must have at least 25-30 members elected in at least seven EU member states.
Le Pen said she was optimistic the National Front could forge a bloc with other parties in the European Parliament.
"I've got a whole series of meetings soon," she said.
Asked if she would like to work with the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), she said: "It would be possible. We have the same fundamental position on Europe."
UKIP leader Nigel Farage has, however, ruled out working with France's National Front. "They come from a different political family," he told the BBC in an interview. "We want nothing to do with that party at all."
On whether the National Front would work with the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD), Le Pen said: "They have not expressed any such wish up until now. We share certain views with the AfD but it's a popular party - it's an elite one and it has a completely different structure."
Asked if she saw her party getting to the second round of a national presidential election in 2017, Le Pen said that was a "very credible hypothesis" and added that her party had at last as much potential among non-voters as among voters.
"I believe that we'll get into power in the next ten years - perhaps more quickly than some people imagine," she said.
Calling the 28-nation EU a "big disaster, an anti-democratic monster", she said she wanted to destroy the EU but not Europe.
"I want to stop it getting fatter, continuing to breathe, touching everything with its paws and reaching into all areas of our legislation with its tentacles," she said, adding people were allowing their right to self-determination to be stolen.
She said Germany had become the Europe's economic powerhouse "because our leaders are weak" but said its neighbour should never forget that France was the "political heart" of Europe.
She said a strong euro was ruining France and leaving the single currency bloc would represent "an incredible opportunity" for France, which she said was on the way to "underdevelopment".
Le Pen denied her party was xenophobic, saying she did not hate anyone but she added that France, where the number of unemployed rose to a record in April, could no longer afford immigration. She said France needed to save on its welfare system "which gives our citizens the same protection as illegal immigrants".
(Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Rosalind Russell)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/01/uk-france-lepen-idINKBN0EC1FZ20140601 [no comments yet]
--
Silvio Berlusconi - exclusive interview - Newsnight
Published on May 20, 2014 by BBC Newsnight [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6o-wWU-v2ClFMwougmK7dA ]
Jeremy Paxman speaks to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his villa outside Milan.
WARNING: Contains explicit language [starting at 3:05].
Follow @BBCNewsnight on Twitter
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight
Like BBC Newsnight on Facebook
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlsX3BegCkE [comments disabled]
--
Most Russian Troops Leaving Ukraine Border, Officials Report
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Posted: 05/29/2014 10:04 pm EDT Updated: 05/29/2014 10:59 pm EDT
ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (AP) — U.S. defense officials said Thursday that Russia has pulled most of its forces away from the Ukraine border, a withdrawal that the U.S. has been demanding for weeks.
They said about seven battalions remained, amounting to a couple of thousand troops. U.S. officials had estimated as many as 40,000 Russian forces had been aligned along the border with a restive eastern Ukraine that has been wracked with violence between government security forces and pro-Russian separatists.
The defense officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the precise numbers.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel didn't provide any details to reporters traveling with him at the start of a 12-day overseas trip, but he called the withdrawal promising.
"They are not where they need to be and won't be until all of their troops that they positioned along that border a couple of months ago are gone," Hagel said.
"We do know that thousands of Russian troops have been pulled back and are moving away. But we also know that there are still thousands of Russian troops still there that have not yet moved," Hagel said.
Hagel said he has not spoken to his Russian counterpart about the withdrawal.
Hagel was among Obama administration officials who expressed new concerns Thursday about rising violence in eastern Ukraine, including the downing of a military helicopter by pro-Russian rebels.
The White House and State Department both said a de-escalation of the crisis was imperative and called on Russia to exert pressure on the separatists to get them to end the fighting and release a group of international monitors who have been detained in eastern Ukraine since earlier this week.
"We are disturbed by the ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine," presidential spokesman Jay Carney said at the White House. While the U.S. has not been able to verify what happened to the helicopter, he said, "We are concerned that this indicates separatists continue to have access to advanced weaponry and other assistance from the outside."
Ukraine's acting president said earlier Thursday that 12 troops died when rebels shot down a military helicopter in Slovyansk using a portable air defense missile.
Even before the incident, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on Wednesday to reiterate U.S. concerns about the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, the State Department said.
Kerry raised with Lavrov reports of Chechen fighters crossing into Ukraine to join the separatists, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at the State Department.
Kerry "pressed Foreign Minister Lavrov to end all support for separatists, denounce their actions and call on them to lay down their arms," she said.
"Our broad view, as you know, is that de-escalation is the proper path forward," Psaki added, although she said she was not aware of concerns that Ukrainian security forces were using disproportionate means to quell the fighting as some Russians have alleged.
Carney and Psaki also said it was unacceptable that insurgents have detained four observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They demanded their immediate release.
The U.S. has called on Russia repeatedly to help de-escalate tensions in Ukraine, including withdrawing troops massed near Ukraine.
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2014 Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/29/russia-ukraine_n_5414736.html [with comments]
--
More foreign fighters break cover among Ukraine separatists
Pro-Russian rebels of the Battalion Vostok take positions outside the local administration building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, May 29, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Yannis Behrakis/Files
By Gabriela Baczynska
Sun Jun 1, 2014 8:57pm IST
DONETSK Ukraine (Reuters) - In flak jackets and mismatched camouflage fatigues, men from eastern Ukraine, Russia and Ossetia cleaned their weapons side by side in a former Ukrainian army base, now the headquarters of a separatist militia in the city of Donetsk.
Battalion Vostok - or the East Battalion - is a heavily armed, well-organised fighting group that has burst onto the scene in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east and appears to be seeking to lead the fight to prise the region from Kiev and merge it with Russia.
The group encountered at the former Ukrainian base included a total of at least five fighters from the Russian Caucasus region of North Ossetia and from a Russian-backed enclave of Georgia.
They acknowledged they had been fighting alongside Chechens from Russia's former rebellious region of Chechnya, but these, they said, had now gone home.
The presence of fighters from Russia and other parts of former Soviet space is likely to feature prominently in talks this week when Ukraine's President-elect, Petro Poroshenko, meets U.S. President Barack Obama and later, possibly, Russia's Vladimir Putin.
"The split of the country is final. There is nothing uniting us with them (the Kiev leadership) now," Alexander Khodakovsky, a defector from the Ukrainian state security service who now commands Battalion Vostok, told Reuters.
"Kiev has already understood that they have lost south-eastern Ukraine, that it is a sphere of Russian influence, and one way or another it will remain so," said the 41-year-old.
The men of Battalion Vostok see Russia as the heart of their own civilisation and values, irreconcilable with the pro-Western course taken by the Ukrainian authorities.
Kiev denounces them as terrorists and accuses Russia of supporting the rebellion in the east, where separatists have proclaimed independent "people's republics" and where scores of rebel fighters died in clashes with Ukraine's army in May.
Composed and relaxed, Khodakovsky strikes a sharp contrast with many of his men - taciturn and hiding their faces behind balaclavas - who fought the heaviest battles with the Ukrainian army around Donetsk city airport and in the village of Karlovka this month.
For him, the conflict is part of a global standoff between Russia and the United States in a bipolar world, more than two decades after Ukraine took its independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Technically, we have been an independent country, but the borders were only a formality, and we could go on feeling ourselves part of Russia," he said.
"We do not want to be against Russia, and if we are allied with the European Union and NATO, we would automatically be. We made our choice."
Moscow denies involvement in the conflict that threatens to tear Ukraine apart and has dragged ties between Russia and the West to their lowest since the Cold War.
The Kiev leadership says Russian border authorities could do far more to stop these armed groups crossing into eastern Ukraine.
Violence in the east intensified in the run-up to the May 25 election in Ukraine in which a first round win by Poroshenko, a confectionery magnate, gave the signal for a Ukrainian military offensive against the separatists.
FOREIGN FIGHTERS
Foreign fighters at the Battalion Vostok base in the north-eastern part of Donetsk, a city of 1 million people, gave various reasons for joining the separatists defending the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic".
"My personal motivation is the religion, protecting Orthodox Christianity from the West," said Oleg, nicknamed Mamay, from North Ossetia, a Russian region on the northern rim of the Caucasus mountains.
Just south of his homeland is South Ossetia, a Russia-dependent breakaway region of Georgia, which is populated by the same, mostly Orthodox ethnic group as the northern part.
In 2008, Moscow and Tbilisi fought a brief war over South Ossetia, which Russia now considers an independent state, though it is unrecognised internationally.
"In 2008 they were killing us and the Russians saved us. I came here to pay my dues to them," said a South Ossetian man with skin damage that made it difficult to assess his age.
Oleg - stout, black-haired and bearded, carrying a flak jacket and a short machine gun on his arm - said there were 15 Ossetians, including himself, fighting in the ranks of Battalion Vostok around the Donetsk airport on May 26-27.
He and other Vostok fighters said their casualties included one native of Chechnya, a region of Russia where Moscow fought two separatist wars and which is now run by a Kremlin appointee Ramzan Kadyrov, who runs his own militia, or "Kadyrovtsy".
"There are no Chechens now. There were. They left yesterday (on Thursday) with their injured and killed. There was only one casualty among the Chechens," Khodakovsky said. "They were volunteers, not Kadyrovtsy."
Echoing Moscow's denials of involvement, Kadyrov says he has not sent his men to fight in eastern Ukraine but that some have apparently gone of their own accord.
The separatist leader Denis Pushilin said after the battle for the airport, which is now controlled by the Ukrainian army, that the bodies of "volunteers" from Russia would be returned home, openly acknowledging involvement from across the border.
Battalion Vostok fighters also said their comrades included a few from the states of former Soviet Central Asia.
Khodakovsky said he had some 1,000 men in his unit now and that some more "volunteers" were coming, with experience of state security structures or the army.
The unit started gaining shape in early May as blood was drawn in the southeastern city ports of Odessa and Mariupol in clashes between pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainian protesters as well as the law enforcement bodies.
MIXED ALLEGIANCES
Until mid-March, Khodakovsky used to head the elite special unit "Alfa" in his native Donetsk region, a senior and prestigious role in the state security service.
He says his shift was gradual, from rejection of the interim authorities brought to power in Kiev by street protests that in February ousted the former president, Moscow ally Viktor Yanukovich, to an all-out rejection of being part of Ukraine.
Battalion Vostok is one of multiple armed groups fighting on the pro-Russian side in the east, with blurred command and coordination lines and different priorities.
The unit has shown signs recently of flexing its muscles and acting against some other separatists whom Battalion Vostok denounces as looters.
Khodakovsky, who is also responsible for state security in the separatist republic's "government", sides with another armed unit called Oplot and the separatist's "prime minister" Alexander Boroday, who publicly admits to being a Muscovite.
"Some Moscow politicians finance their own people in our government; that is an inevitable necessity," he said, without giving details.
He dismissed Pushilin, leader of the "Donetsk People's Republic", as just a figurehead and admitted he had no illusions as to Moscow's immediate goals in Ukraine's east.
"I think Russia uses us to pursue its geo-political interests, have a buffer between itself and the West. We do not deceive ourselves about that. But even knowing this, we stick to Russia because it is our culture," he said.
The rebels have now taken positions deeper into Donetsk, an industrial hub, setting up barricades and posts in residential areas in the hope that Ukraine's army would not fight in a densely populated area and endanger the urban infrastructure.
"We have no other option," Khodakovsky said. "They should understand the consequences of fighting within a city if Poroshenko wants to go down in history as 'The Bloody One'."
(Additional reporting by Sabina Zawadzki, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Richard Balmforth and Will Waterman)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/06/01/uk-ukraine-crisis-vostok-idINKBN0EC1MZ20140601
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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