Ukraine pleads for talks as stand-off turns bloody
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Ukraine's premier came to the United Nations on Thursday to urge Russia to negotiate an end to the stand-off between their countries, as street battles in his homeland turned bloody.
At least one pro-Kiev protester was stabbed and killed in the eastern city of Donetsk when a demonstration in favor of Ukrainian unity was attacked by a Russian separatist crowd.
News of the death broke as Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk addressed an emergency session of the UN Security Council on the crisis opposing his interim government and the Kremlin.
Yatsenyuk said a negotiated solution was still possible, if Russia agrees to withdraw its forces from the Ukrainian region of Crimea and begin a serious diplomatic dialogue.
"We want to have talks. We don't want to have any kind of military aggression," he insisted, turning to directly address Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin.
Churkin ridiculed the idea that there had been an "idyllic situation" before the crisis, but said: "Russia does not want war and nor do the Russians, and I'm convinced that Ukrainians don't want this either."
Ukraine and Russia have been locked in an escalating stand-off since February 22, when a street revolt overthrew Ukraine's former pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin refuses to recognize Yatsenyuk's new pro-Western administration, and tensions are building between rival camps inside Ukraine.
The crisis could come to a head on Sunday when Crimea -- now occupied by pro-Moscow forces -- is due to hold a referendum on becoming part of Russia.
Yatsenyuk has a strong diplomatic hand.
His government has been recognized by European powers, he won the full backing of US President Barack Obama in Washington on Wednesday and he is negotiating an IMF bailout.
But the facts on the ground favor Putin.
Russia's military is far larger than Ukraine's, and Russian troops have already seized control on the Crimean Peninsula, home to a mainly ethnic Russian population and Russia's Black Sea fleet.
Moscow makes no secret of its plan to annex Crimea after Sunday's referendum, which Kiev and Washington have declared illegitimate -- promising the worst East-West split since the Cold War.
- Protests turn bloody -
Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, rival protests between pro- and anti-Russian factions have turned bloody, threatening to draw the opposing security forces into conflict in the streets.
On Thursday, a 22-year-old Ukrainian was killed when a pro-Kiev rally in the eastern city of Donetsk was attacked by a pro-Moscow group, the first confirmed death since Crimea was seized.
"According to preliminary conclusions by doctors, he has been stabbed," the local branch of Ukraine's health ministry told AFP, as regional authorities spoke of another 16 wounded in the clashes.
Thirteen of these were in trauma or in surgery with serious injuries, one was hospitalized and two were treated at the scene, said Ilya Suzdalev, a spokesman for the regional authorities.
And a Crimean Tatar leader urged NATO to intervene to protect his people from falling under Russian rule after the referendum, which his minority Muslim community had vowed to boycott.
"If other measures do not work, then NATO should intervene like in Kosovo," Mustafa Dzhemilev told AFP in a phone interview from Brussels, where he was preparing to meet NATO officials.
Western powers rule out military intervention, but Washington and the European Union are preparing what US Secretary of State John Kerry called "a very serious series of steps" against Russia.
His blunt comments came shortly after Ukraine's parliament voted to set up a huge volunteer force.
And Russia on Thursday launched its own military maneuvers at its neighbor's doorstep and also dispatched fighter jets to Belarus in a show of military muscle that betrayed no willingness to compromise.
Russia's tanks and artillery units were training across three regions neighboring Ukraine while 4,000 paratroopers began performing drills in the central region of Rostov.
Russia also has nuclear weapons, while Ukraine gave up the arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union in 1994.
At the United Nations, Yatsenyuk warned that if aggression against his nation was allowed to stand, it would damage international efforts to persuade other countries not to seek nuclear arms.
"As after these actions it would be very difficult to convince anyone in the globe not to have nuclear weapons," he said.
The United States has dispatched six additional F-15 fighters to Lithuania and 12 F-16s for aviation training in Poland.
