The war in Ukraine’s east has come back to Kiev

IGOR DEBRIN, a 24-year-old conscript in Ukraine’s national guard, had a seemingly safe posting in Kiev, far from the country’s embattled eastern regions. On Monday, he was sent to keep watch outside Ukraine’s parliament, where a controversial vote to change the country’s constitution brought raucous protestors to the streets (pictured). By day’s end, parliament had passed the changes, but Mr Debrin lay dead, the victim of a grenade thrown by a nationalist demonstrator. More than 100 other soldiers and policemen were wounded. Another two national guardsmen died on Tuesday, succumbing to injuries sustained in the blast. They were the first killed in protests in Kiev since Ukraine’s Maidan revolution last year.

 

The trigger for the violence was a bill that would grant greater autonomy to separatist-held areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, has lobbied hard for the measures, which he says are a crucial step to fulfilling the peace deal signed in Minsk earlier this year. Ukraine’s western allies have pushed Kiev to unilaterally move forward with its end of the agreement. “We must show the world that Ukraine is a reliable partner,” says Hanna Hopko, head of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, and a supporter of the bill.

 

Opponents call the changes unacceptable concessions, especially as long as Russia and its separatist proxies fail to fully cease hostilities in the east. The protestors outside parliament gathered under the banners of Svoboda, a ultranationalist party that backed the Maidan revolution but has been marginalised since. But the man who threw the grenade is said to be a soldier from one of Ukraine’s volunteer battalions, a harrowing reminder of the problems posed by Ukraine’s growing number of traumatised war veterans.

 

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