Situationen i Ukraina just nu.

Ukraine’s acting president has offered an amnesty to pro-Russian protesters who have seized government buildings in the east of the country.

Oleksandr Turchynov said he guaranteed they would not be prosecuted if they voluntarily surrendered weapons and gave up the premises.

He added that he had spoken by phone with demonstrators who have taken over a Security Service building in Luhansk.

But they have rejected the offer.

“The terms offered are unacceptable to us. They are promising clemency in exchange for our giving up our weapons – this is not appropriate for us,” said Sergei Korsunsky, one of the protest leaders.

The offer is understood also to apply to protesters in Donetsk, who are occupying the main regional government headquarters.

The First Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema, sent to the city to solve the crisis, said on Wednesday night that he hoped demonstrators would leave during the day.

But some pro-Russian activists show no sign of giving up.

“My mood is just fabulous. This is the Russian Spring, and it’s continuing.

The ties between Akhmetov and Yanukovych go back “more than 20 years,” the billionaire told the Financial Times on March 17. During that time they rose from their origins in the Donetsk region to corner the nation’s two most powerful positions in business and government.

After Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, Akhmetov purchased MMK Ilyich and Zaporizhstal, two steel mills that increased revenue at his Metinvest, the country’s largest steel manufacturer, by 52 percent to more than $14 billion in 2011.---

Poroshenko is leading the polls in next month’s elections against former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was released from prison the day Yanukovych fled Kiev for Russia, and has once again set her sights on Akhmetov and the rest of the country’s ruling class.

“One of my top priorities will be transforming Ukraine’s oligarchy to fair business, which will act separately from politics and won’t feed upon the state,” Tymoshenko, 53, said at a March 27 press conference. “We will introduce common rules for them. The chain of money-politics-money will no longer exist.”

In 2004, Tymoshenko took aim at Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of former President Leonid Kuchma and Ukraine’s second-richest man. The pair acquired Kryvorizhstal, the country’s largest steel mill, for $800 million in a 2004 state asset sale while Yanukovych was in office.

Tymoshenko’s government killed the deal after she took office a year later. It ended up being sold to Mittal Steel Co., owned by Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, for $4.8 billion.

“What’s happening now is that the great majority of people in Ukraine, irrespective of whether they’re Ukrainian speakers or Russian speakers or Tartar speakers or Polish speakers, more and more of them just want to get away from Russia,” he said.

The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943 when a senior UPA commander, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, ordered the liquidation of the entire male Polish population between 16 and 60 years of age.[7][8][9] Despite this, most of the victims were women and children.[4] According to Grzegorz Motyka, the actions of the UPA resulted in 40,000-60,000 Polish civilian deaths in Volhynia,[3] and from 30,000 to 40,000 in Eastern Galicia.[3][10] Other estimates place the upper bound at much higher levels (see table).

The killings were directly linked with the policies of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military arm - Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal specified at the Second Conference of the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during 17–23 February 1943, or at least in March 1943 was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state.

The atrocities were carried out indiscriminately and without restraint. The victims, regardless of their age or gender, were routinely tortured to death. Norman Davies in No Simple Victory gives a short, but shocking description of the massacres. He writes:

Villages were torched. Roman Catholic priests were axed or crucified. Churches were burned with all their parishioners. Isolated farms were attacked by gangs carrying pitchforks and kitchen knives. Throats were cut. Pregnant women were bayoneted. Children were cut in two. Men were ambushed in the field and led away. The perpetrators could not determine the province's future. But at least they could determine that it would be a future without Poles.[85]

An OUN order from early 1944 stated:

Liquidate all Polish traces. Destroy all walls in the Catholic Church and other Polish prayer houses. Destroy orchards and trees in the courtyards so that there will be no trace that someone lived there... Pay attention to the fact that when something remains that is Polish, then the Poles will have pretensions to our land".[11]

Timothy Snyder describes the murders: "Ukrainian partisans burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. In some cases, beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies were displayed, in order to encourage remaining Poles to flee".[86] A similar account has been presented by Niall Ferguson, who wrote: "Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted."[87] Ukrainian historian Yuryi Kirichuk described the conflict as similar to medieval rebellions.[88]

According to Polish historian Piotr Łossowski, the method used in most of the attacks was the same. At first, local Poles were assured that nothing would happen to them. Then, at dawn, a village was surrounded by armed members of the UPA, behind whom were peasants with axes, hammers, knives, and saws. All the Poles encountered were murdered; sometimes they were herded into one spot, to make it easier. After a massacre, all goods were looted, including clothes, grain, and furniture. The final part of an attack was setting fire to the village.[89] In many cases, victims were tortured and their bodies mutilated. All vestiges of Polish existence eradicated with even abandoned Polish settlements burned to the ground.[46]

A closer look at the phenomena of “Donetsk separatism” reveals a different picture.

Many of the key personalities and organizations associated with the separatist events, it turns out, are either Russians or people with identifiable connections to Russia. Moreover, the local government budgets of Donetsk funded at least some of these anti-Ukrainian demonstrations.