THERE are now more than 15,000 Ukrainian military servicemen plus reserve forces and the Right Sector movement, with around 160 tanks, 230 infantry combat vehicles, armoured personnel carriers and helicopter gunships in the vicinity of the town of Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine.
There have already been a number of probing operations and clashes in which some defenders of eastern Ukraine have been killed or hurt.
There are also other probing and offensive operations taking place, organised by the US-EU-backed Kiev coupist regime, throughout the east and south of the country.
Three members of Ukraine’s special Alpha anti-terrorist unit have been detained during a covert mission in the Donetsk region. The Commander of the ‘Donetsk Republic’ self-defence forces, Igor Strelkov, has confirmed that they have been detained in the city of Gorlovka, in the Donetsk region.
Earlier on Friday, self-defence forces in Slavyansk detained eight foreign military observers, who they are calling ‘NATO spies’.
The People’s Mayor of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, said that the group had ‘cards marked with all of their checkpoints’ which he said ‘serves as proof of their intelligence activities under the guise of the OSCE mission’.
The detained team are not OSCE monitors, as widely reported, but instead were sent by OSCE member states in accordance with the 2011 Vienna Document on military transparency, the organisation explained on Friday. The current German-led group arrived in Ukraine on April 21 at Kiev’s request.
Despite the demand from Moscow and the international community to release the four Germans, a Bulgarian, Czech, Dane and a Pole, the mayor Ponomaryov has correctly not acceded to the request, as he has not ruled out that the group could be used in a prisoner exchange for anti-government activists, dozens of whom have been arrested by Kiev’s coup-installed authorities over the last month.
A group of German negotiators have already arrived in eastern Ukraine for talks to set free the detained military observers, while a leader of the group has stated at a press conference that he is being treated well and has full confidence in the mayor.
‘The Kiev junta has our fellows and comrades. Therefore, if there is a possibility, we are ready for an exchange,’ Ponomaryov said, answering the questions of journalists on Saturday.
He dismissed the allegations of the Ukrainian Security Service that the group is being held in ‘inhuman conditions’.
‘They are in alright condition. One of the soldiers suffers from diabetes, but it is not a serious condition, he is on tablets. There is medicine there is food,’ Ponomaryov said, adding that they are still trying to verify the purpose of the group’s activities in Slavyansk.
On Saturday, a representative of the protesters told journalists that the detained officers had ‘maps of Slavyansk with checkpoints and barricades marked on them, dog tags and live ammo,’ which proved they were acting officers gathering intelligence.
The crux of the matter is that all the forces have now been assembled for the assault on the town of Slavyansk.
Working people all over the world, and their trade unions must give their full support to the embattled workers of eastern Ukraine.
The trade unions in the UK, the US and the EU, must tell their governments that if there is an assault on any of the eastern cities then the trade unions will call general strikes to bring down the governments in the West that organised the Kiev coup in the first place.
They must be told, as well, that workers will not accept any western military intervention, and that they view the attacks on the workers of eastern Ukraine as a foreign policy extension of the savage attacks that are taking place on the working class at home, in the US, EU and the UK.
