ODESSA, October 1. /TASS/. There were no Russian citizens among the people involved in the tragic and bloody mass disorders that swept Odessa on May 2, 2014, the regional Governor, Igor Palitsa told a group of foreign reporters on Wednesday.
“I don’t have any information on the holders of Russian or Transdniestrian (Transdniestria, a mostly Slavic-populated breakaway region of Moldova - Itar-Tass) passports took part in the events,” Palitsa said answering a question on the events that left 48 people dead and more than 200, wounded,” Palitsa said.
The governor, who took the reins of power at the Odessa regional administration just several days after the tragic clashes between supporters and opponents of the Kiev regime in the downtown district of the ‘jewel on the Black Sea shore’, believes that investigation of the May 2 tragedy could be successful only if the masterminds of the tumult were found while in reality they are still on wanted lists.
“The sooner we’ll be able to round up the investigation and the Odessites and the rest of the world will learn the truth, the sooner the entire case will transfer to the category of statistics but the culprits should be brought to punishment regardless of who they actually represent,” he said.
Palitsa believes that the months, which have passed since the May 2 massacre, have seen reconciliation of different forces in society and the fact rules out a repetition of such tragedies in the future.
“By and large, people took to the streets then because of misunderstanding of and poor explanations for what was happening, because of corruption that existed then, and because of the backlog of everyday problems, which somehow pushed people to the opposite sides of law,” he said, claiming that the new authorities had practically managed to eliminate this division line.
May 2, football fans that had come from northeastern city of Kharkov as well as the combatants from the Right Sector far-right extremist organization and from the so-called Maidan Self-Defense Force clashed with the supporters of federalization of Ukraine in downtown Odessa. They set fire to the regional House of the Trade Unions, where some activists of the democratic movement had been taking shelter, and to a tent camp near it where other activists had been gathering signatures in favor of a referendum for federalization of Ukraine and for granting Russian the status of a second state language.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week as he was addressing the 69th session of the UN General Assembly that it would be difficult to restore peace in Ukraine without tracking down all the culprits of crimes.
“Nothing has been done to track down and prosecute those responsible for February bloody events at Maidan and massive loss of human lives in Odessa, Mariupol and other regions of Ukraine,” he said. “The scale of appalling humanitarian disaster provoked by the acts of the Ukrainian army in the South-Eastern Ukraine has been deliberately underscored.”
“Recently, new horrible facts have been brought to light when mass graves were discovered in the suburbs of Donetsk,” Lavrov said. “Despite Resolution 2166 of the United Nations Secretary General, a thorough and independent investigation of the circumstances of the loss of Malaysian airliner (MH17) over the territory of Ukraine has been protracted.”
He indicated that the culprits of all these crimes must be identified and brought to justice. “Otherwise the national reconciliation in Ukraine can hardly be expected.