PRESIDENT Putin’s press spokesman Dmitriy Peskov told journalists on Saturday that Moscow was getting thousands of calls from people in Ukraine’s southeast: ‘People are calling in despair, asking for help, most of them demand Russia’s assistance. All these calls are reported to Vladimir Putin.’
Peskov added: ‘President Putin, Russia will continue to pursue a policy aimed at de-escalation. We shall do everything that is possible and where it is possible in order to, step-by-step, move towards de-escalation.’
Peskov added that, ‘The authorities in Kiev are not only directly responsible but are direct participants in these criminal actions. Their hands are already covered in blood up to their elbows.’
The events in Odessa took place ‘with the clear negligence of those who consider themselves the authorities in Kiev’, Peskov said.
‘Under their negligence, extremists and radicals burnt alive absolutely unarmed people. I stress that the people were unarmed,’ he added.
He stressed: ‘It is clear that on the basis of the current constitution and under the conditions of military activities in the circumstances of a punitive operation and mass murders, it would be at least absurd to talk about any elections.’
Peskov added that Putin ‘is extremely concerned by the developments and their interpretations in some countries of the world community’.
‘Putin is deeply outraged by the actions of the Kiev authorities, which can be interpreted as a crime,’ the president’s spokesman said.
Accusing the West of ‘deepest cynicism’, over the Odessa massacre, Peskov added: ‘We note with great regret the approval of the punitive operation, the approval of what Kiev is doing regarding the southeastern regions of Ukraine.
‘We consider absolutely inadmissible for universal understanding the words of certain representatives (of the West) that “the monopoly on the use of force should belong to the Ukrainian state”.’
‘Those who describe the junta in Kiev as the legitimate authorities become party to this crime,’ Peskov asserted.
Pro-Russian activist Yehor Kvasnyuk, leader of the Odessa-based ‘liberation movement Kulikovo Pole’, has said that after the events in the town on 2 May, a ‘partisan resistance’ will begin against armed militants.
‘Now there will be a reformatting regardless of my wish or what Kiev wants. Now a partisan movement will begin. I see that in the social networks, through my secret means of communication. The people are furious, but so far there is still a sense of shock. Just a day or two of shock, and then I am not sure Odessa won’t hit back at these alien mercenaries,’ Kvasynuk said.
