Yesterday, while I was on my way to a meeting, Natasha Kolomoytseva called me on my mobile. She told me that she had been walking on the banks of the Dnieper, not far from the Rusanovka embankment where she lives, when she saw a car stop in front of the floating hotel-restaurant and people taking weapons from the vehicle to the hotel. She was scared and wondered what to do. She took down the car’s registration number. I advised her to call the SBU or the police. Soon afterwards she called me back to say that no one was answering any of the various numbers for the SBU she had found on the Internet, but that the police had promised to send a patrol car. Then the police had turned up at her house and behaved strangely. They said they hadn’t found anything suspicious, took her mobile phone number, and told her that a local officer would be round to see her. Now she was worried by the idea that the police might pass the details on to some other department. I looked up the number for Ihor Smeshko, head of the SBU from 2003 to 2005. I didn’t manage to get hold of him at home, but I sent him all the information on Facebook, including the car’s registration number. That evening, he replied to say he had sent the information to be verified. Phew! I hope this case is now being handled by professionals.
Last night, while we were opening the book festival and I was receiving the Legion of Honour from Alain Rémy, the French ambassador to Ukraine, in Luhansk the situation continued to worsen around the SBU’s regional government building. The occupying separatists have nearly a thousand guns, lots of Kalashnikovs and even grenade launchers. They have taken more than fifty hostages. The separatists are in constant communication with Russia, from where these actions are being coordinated. The men inside the occupied building also communicate by phone with their supporters in the Luhansk region. The security services are spying on some of these conversations, and what they heard makes it clear that during the night, at 5 a.m., Russian troops were readying to enter Ukrainian territory. The Russian coordinators asked the separatists to neutralise the border guards on a country road, so that their soldiers could enter Ukraine and, as planned, support the besieged separatists in Luhansk.
In spite of the concentration of troops observed in the Luhansk region, however, the Russian army did not cross the Ukrainian border. It was probably prevented from doing so by the fact that the Ukrainian border guards have been reinforced with military units transferred from other regions. Nevertheless, the attack could occur at any time. Television cameras recorded a brief harangue recalling old Hollywood Z-movies. The central message, delivered by several men in balaclavas and camouflage outfits, bedecked with various weapons, was this: ‘Welcome to Hell!’ For the moment, negotiations seem to be going nowhere. But most of the hostages – security service agents – have been released. I fear this situation will inevitably end in bloodshed.
In Donetsk, on the other hand, things have improved a little. The men who had taken over the regional SBU building have left, without their weapons. The regional administration building is still occupied, though, surrounded by barricades and piles of tyres, which the separatists set on fire from time to time. They claim to have a vast stock of Molotov cocktails. In Mykolaiv, everything has calmed down, and in Odessa too, apparently.
In Crimea, a Russian sergeant shot an unarmed Ukrainian major who needed to cross into continental Ukraine to continue his military service. He was buried today in Berdyansk, while the man reportedly responsible for his death, Sergeant Zaytsev, has not even been charged. He is still at large. It won’t be long before killing someone in Crimea because they don’t want a Russian passport is not even considered a crime.
How vast my country seems. Here in Kiev, I have the impression that all this is happening on the other side of the world!
We celebrated my Legion of Honour at home yesterday, and the party went on until nearly midnight. My two cousins were there with their families, and so were the Kapranov brothers, my three editors, the French and German ambassadors, French diplomats and writers here for the book festival, and other friends. We spent almost the whole evening talking about the Maidan, describing what each of us had been through.