KIEV: Ukraine police have arrested three persons in the Ukrainian city of Odessa under suspicion of organising eight bombings in the city since September, Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior reported.
The detainees are all Odessa natives, two of them men aged 46 and 55, while the third alleged accomplice is a 29-year-old woman. They are suspected of being members of a non-governmental organisation aligned with the pro-Russian movement – Anti-Maidan – which opposes last year’s Ukraine-wide Maidan revolution that toppled president Viktor Yanukovych.
Among the eight incidents, three bombings were carried out in March alone. One at a Christian organisation’s centre, as well as the offices of pro-European party Samopomich and at a centre for volunteers who support Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the east of the country.
According to Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) the alleged attackers are part of a bigger threat in Odessa. Over the last year cities such as Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa have become targets for pro-Russian cells functioning outside the eastern Donbas region of the country where the majority of fighting between Kiev forces and Moscow-backed rebels takes place.
A group calling itself the Kharkiv Partisans has been particularly relentless in trying to spread the eastern conflict further west, while the SBU says they are in the midst of a crackdown against such activities in Odessa. According to the SBU, Russia’s security services use social media and online propaganda to radicalise native Ukrainians and convince them to turn on the Ukrainian government.
