LUGANSK, May 2. /TASS/. Russian military personnel, including those from the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), are fighting in order to ensure that tragedies like the one that occurred in Odessa on May 2, 2014, will never happen again, Acting LPR Head Leonid Pasechnik said on Tuesday, the ninth anniversary of the fatal fire at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa.
He stressed that, in 2014, supporters of the Kiev regime virtually re-enacted the atrocities committed 80 years earlier in Khatyn, Belarus, by followers of World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. "Nine years later, the criminals have not been punished; there have not even been any attempts to try to find them," he wrote on his Telegram channel. "Our soldiers are fighting now for each one of those killed at the hands of the fascists [in Odessa] and so that justice will triumph and unspeakable crimes like this will not be repeated," he added.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, radicals from the Right Sector organization (banned in Russia) and the so-called Maidan self-defense forces attacked a tent encampment in Odessa’s Kulikovo Field public park, where city residents had been gathering signatures for a referendum on the federalization of Ukraine and on granting Russian official language status. Some supporters of federalization took refuge in the adjacent House of Trade Unions, but the mob of radicals surrounded the building and set it on fire, blocking the exits. In the tragic events of that day, according to official Ukrainian Interior Ministry data, 48 people died and more than 240 others were injured.
The authorities blamed the unrest entirely on "anti-Maidan" activists. However, the investigation, which lasted several years, was unable to prove their guilt in court. As a result, all those initially detained were acquitted.