Anti-Separatist Protest in Ukraine Turns Violent Monday August 31,2015

 

A Grenade exploded outside Ukraine's Parliament during a nationalist protest against a vote to give greater powers to separatist regions in the east, killing one police officer and injuring more than 120, the interior ministry said

The clashes marked the worst outburst of violence in the capital since the government took power in February 2014

 

The decentralisation of power was a condition of a true signed in Minsk in Feb 2015 aimed at ending the fighting between Ukrainian government troops and Russia-backed separatists that has left more than 6,800 dead since April 2014
 But some Ukrainians oppose changing the constitution, saying that it would threaten the country's sovereignty and independence.

In a televised address, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the bill, which was adopted on Monday as '' a difficult but a logical step toward peace'' and insisted that it wouldn't give any autonomy to the rebels

The officer who was killed in the clashes on Monday August 31,2015 was a 25-year-old conscript,
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov told  that 122 people were hospitalised -- most are officers, but the number also includes Ukrainian journalists and two French reporters. No injuries were immediately reported among several hundred protesters including 100 die-hard activists, most of whom were members of Svoboda, a nationalist party that holds only a handful of seats in parliament. The protesters were carrying sticks and truncheons. Some of them were masked.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said that about 30 people have been detained, including the person who threw the grenade.

 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov identified the grenade thrower as a Svoboda member who fought in the east in one of the volunteer battalions which are loosely controlled by the government.
Poroshenko described the clashes outside the parliament as an attack on him and pledged to prosecute "all political leaders" who were behind the clashes. "There's no other way to describe what occurred outside the Rada other than a stab in the back," he said of the clashes outside parliament. Poroshenko said the vote confirmed Ukraine's "position as a trusted partner which fulfills its international obligations" and the country would have risked losing the support of the West and being left "alone with the aggressor."

A total of 265 deputies in the 450-seat parliament gave preliminary approval Monday August 31,2015 to the changes proposed by President Poroshenko.
 Three parties that are part of the majority coalition in parliament, however, opposed the constitutional changes.
"This is not a road to peace and not a road to decentralization," said the leader of one of those parties, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
 "This is the diametrically opposite process, which will lead to the loss of new territories."