Ukraine leader offers concession

Protesters dismiss vow to give eastern areas more powers

A masked pro-Russian activist warms himself next to a makeshift fire as he guards a regional administration building that they had seized earlier in Donetsk, Ukraine,  Friday, April 11, 2014.  Ukraine’s prime minister on Friday told leaders in the country’s restive east that he is committed to allowing regions to have more powers. Yatsenyuk Friday morning flew into Donetsk, where pro-Russian separatists are occupying the regional administration building and calling for a referendum that could prefigure seeking annexation by Russia. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

A masked pro-Russian activist warms himself next to a makeshift fire as he guards a regional administration building that they had seized earlier in Donetsk, Ukraine, Friday, April 11, 2014. Ukraine’s prime minister on Friday told leaders in the country’s restive east that he is committed to allowing regions to have more powers. Yatsenyuk Friday morning flew into Donetsk, where pro-Russian separatists are occupying the regional administration building and calling for a referendum that could prefigure seeking annexation by Russia. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Saturday, April 12, 2014

DONETSK, Ukraine - Ukraine’s acting prime minister Friday abandoned threats to forcibly evict pro-Russian demonstrators from government buildings and assured political and business leaders in the country’s east that they would get more power to run their own affairs.

But the pledge by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the head of a new central government in Kiev installed after the Feb. 21 flight of President Viktor Yanukovych, drew a dismissive response from protesters.

A deadline set by the government to relinquish the occupied regional administration building in Donetsk passed with no sign of an end to the standoff, which began Sunday when protesters seized the building and declared the establishment of a People’s Republic of Donetsk.

In a television statement broadcast to a small and mostly elderly crowd outside the occupied building, Ekaterina Gubareva, the newly appointed “foreign minister” of the universally unrecognized Donetsk republic, denounced Yatsenyuk’s government as a “junta” and repeated demands for a referendum to let local residents decide whether they want to secede and join Russia.

Oleg Tsarov, a Russian-speaking candidate for the Ukrainian presidency and one of a handful of mainstream politicians who support the Donetsk protesters, said at a news conference that he had information of an imminent “frontal assault” by government forces on the occupied building. He declined to specify how he knew this.

The United States and its allies worry that Russia might use the unrest in Donetsk and other eastern cities - which the Ukrainian authorities believe has been instigated and financed by Moscow - as pretext for a military intervention to “protect” Russian-speaking residents.

Russia has repeatedly denied any plans for an invasion, and many analysts believe its principal goal is not to grab territory but to keep the shaky new Ukrainian government off balance and to make sure it shuns any security partnership with the West. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Friday demanded legal guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality, a position that would close the door to Ukraine’s cooperating with NATO or trying to join it.

In a sign of how closely the Donetsk protesters are acting in concert with Russian interests, anti-NATO chants have become a regular element of their round-the-clock rallies, superseding earlier chants against the “fascists” who they claim grabbed power in Kiev from Yanukovych.

Inside the building, masked young men with clubs and iron rods patrolled the corridors, hunting for alleged “provocateurs” and “spies” while the fractious leadership of the Donetsk People’s Republic tried to figure out what to do next in the 11th-floor offices of the ejected regional governor,a billionaire metals tycoon, Sergey Taruta.

Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, warned Wednesday that protesters in Donetsk and two other eastern cities had 48 hours to resolve their differences with the authorities through negotiation or be forced to give up occupied government buildings. But the government now seems to have scrapped this ultimatum, with Yatsenyuk declaring Friday that he was “against forceful scenarios,” but added: “Everything has a limit.”

Yatsenyuk, speaking in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, a language rarely used in Donetsk, promised that his government would give regions more power to manage their own finances, choose their own leaders and govern their own affairs. Regional governors are currently appointed by the president in Kiev.

“Our task is to balance power between the center” and the regions, he said.

At a meeting Friday with the prime minister, Ukraine’s richest man, Donetsk businessman Rinat Akhmetov, and other regional power brokers, Taruta stressed that economic growth, not force, offered the only way to solve the crisis.

“The biggest problem is poverty, and we must fight against it with all our means,” he said.

The mayor of Kharkiv, Hennadiy Kernes, a former ally of Yanukovych’s, presented a long list of complaints to the government leaders, pointing to rising fuel prices and other problems that he said had stirred anger in the east.

Addressing another source of friction with Moscow, Ukraine’s acting energy minister suggested Friday that he would not pay the elevated prices for natural gas that Russia has been demanding in recent weeks and would contest the basis for the price increase.

The minister, Yuri Prodan, told the parliament that he intended to challenge in an arbitration court in Stockholm a 2009 contract with Gazprom and its subsequent amendments. It is under this contract that Gazprom is claiming an about 80 percent increase in the price of gas, starting this month.

Russian officials said Prodan helped negotiate the contract in 2009, when he served as energy minister under Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and is hardly in a position to dispute its validity.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 04/12/2014