Ukrainian military recruit radicals to kill civilians in south-east

Photo: AP photo

The Ukrainian army tries to promptly replace professional military men with more radical members the Right Sector movement and Maidan activists, the commander of the People's Militia of Slavyansk, Igor Strelkov said.

Strelkov said in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, that Ukrainian commanders were replacing the units of National Guard with Right Sector activists and former activists of Maidan riots. These consider all local people  enemies."

According to him, the soldiers of the National Guard believe that law and order in the east of the country can be established only with the use of force. Strelkov also believes that Italian photographer Andrea Rokkelli and his translator Andrei Mironov were killed in mortar fire on Saturday through radicals' fault.

"They went to make a report to the town border, to the neutral territory in the village of Andreevka. They were noticed, because the Ukrainian military shoot at anything that moves in this area. They do not even try to distinguish, whether there are civilians or the press - they just shoot at anything that moves," Expert Magazine quoted Strelkov as saying.

Mass anti-government protests began in south-eastern regions of Ukraine at the end of February 2014 as a response of the local population to the violent change of power in the country and the subsequent attempt taken by the Verkhovna Rada to cancel the law about the regional status of the Russian language.