Ukrainian separatists reject cease fire
U.N. officials report rise in torture, killings
KIEV, Ukraine – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s offer of a cease-fire was rejected by pro-Russia gunmen on Wednesday as a top United Nations official warned that the separatists were leading their followers down a “dead end.”
In a report by the international monitoring mission deployed by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the world body said killings, abductions and torture have escalated so intensively in the separatist-controlled areas that people were too frightened to leave their homes.
The report by the 34-member team, in Ukraine since March, prompted U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay to urge the separatist gunmen to “stop taking themselves, and the people living in their regions, down this dead end, which is leading simply to misery, destruction, displacement and economic deprivation.”
“All they have achieved is a climate of insecurity and fear which is having a hugely detrimental impact on many thousands of people,” said Pillay, pointing to the team’s calculation that 356 people died in the separatist-held areas between May 7 and June 7.
More than 200 incidents of torture have been alleged by those detained in the rebel-held Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the U.N. report said. The monitors were alluding to those captured and detained by the pro-Russia militants in control of at least a dozen towns and cities as well as by Ukrainian nationalists drawn to the region to retaliate against the fighters.
Pillay said more than 34,000 people have been displaced by the fighting.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, where the president addressed graduates of the national military academy, Poroshenko said he had proposed a unilateral cease-fire to give the separatists a chance to lay down their arms in exchange for amnesty.
His proposal was rejected immediately by one of the top leaders of the rebellion.
“He offers to cease fire so that we would lay down arms and his troops could get at us without a shot fired,” Denis Pushilin, leader of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, said in a phone interview. “We could talk peace with the Kiev junta only on condition that their troops and hardware leave the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”