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Ukrainian radicals mounting violent actions to support blockade of Donbass

About a hundred radicals in the central part of the capital city of Vinnitsa on Monday demanding a release of the activists detained earlier

KIEV, March 14. /TASS/. Ukrainian radicals have been mounting violent actions against the country to show their support for the fellow-ultranationalists currently blocking railways that connects the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk republics with other parts of Ukraine.

About a hundred radicals burned automobile tires in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa on Monday demanding a release of the activists detained earlier.

"Participants in the protest issued an appeal to the top officials of the Ukrainian security service SBU in the Vinnitsa region to set the previously detained activists free, to grant them medical assistance and to launch an inquiry into the actions of KORD special assignment police unit," Newsone channel said in a report.

The radicals said the SBU had a resource of time until 10:00 hours EEST on Tuesday, March 14 to respond to their demand.

Earlier on Monday, ultranationalists broke into the building of the Volhynia regional administration in the western city of Lutsk. They demanded a release of detained activists of the blockade, support for the blockade at the level of national legislation and the firing of Vyacheslav Abroskin, the chief of national police in the parts of eastern Ukraine controlled by the Kiev government.

In Kiev, more than 500 people held a meeting in front of Independence Monument in the city center demanding that the authorities pass a law on the occupied territories. Parliament deputy Yegor Sobolev, a member of Samopomich party, the SBU and the police had detained 43 people in Donbass in the course of a special operation. Their whereabouts were unknown, he said.

Samopomich members called the detention of the radicals "an act of destabilization" of the situation in the country.

Alexander Kuts, the chief of the SBU branch in the Donetsk region said more than 80 people had been detained at Krivoy Torets railway station, the place where the radicals placed their cordons as part of the Donbass blockade effort.

He said the SBU efforts aimed to prevent terrorist and subversive activities in the areas adjoining the line of contact, which separates the warring sides in Donbass, and it was not linked to the radicals’ redoubts in any way.

Donetsk region police chief Vyacheslav Abroskin told reporters the police had confiscated eight units of weaponry resembling firearms.