Unknown special forces neutralize Ukrainian punitive battalion

An unknown special purpose force has neutralized a Ukrainian nationalist battalion near Avdeyevka.

According to Spokesman of the Defense Ministry of the Donetsk People’s Republic Eduard Basurin, the local intelligence forces detected a continuing skirmish near Peski-Avdeyevka and reported that an unknown special purpose force had taken by storm the positions earlier captured by a Ukrainian punitive battalion.

According to Basurin, this might be an operation by foreign hirelings to neutralize the unruliest commanders of Ukrainian nationalist battalions.

The Defense Ministry of the Donetsk People’s Republic reports that four fighters have been killed. The bodies of the killed as well as seven injured fighters were placed in a micro-bus and taken deep into the occupied territory. After that incident, the bombardments of the Donetsk Airport stopped.

“This is the first such operation we have witnessed so far. The attackers used silent weapons produced in the west. We also detected the use of hand-held radio sets of European manufacture. Those sets have GPS and can say where exactly a raider is,” Basurin says.

“Considering the Kiev’s authorities’ conflicts with some commanders, this might well be an operation to neutralize the wildest of them. Obviously, they will blame us for this. But the question here is who exactly was the author of that operation: a private foreign military company or one of the NATO special purpose troops deployed in the conflict zone and called by OSCE observers a ‘third force’,” Basurin says.

As EADaily reported earlier, the Kiev authorities are currently at daggers drawn with the national-extremist Right Sector. Recently the leader of the force Dmytro Yarosh urged all patriotic forces to pressure Petro Poroshenko and the Supreme Rada to adopt a law on Ukrainian volunteer corps.

On Apr 28, the 25th and 98th brigades of the Ukrainian army surrounded a base of the Right Sector in Dnipropetrovsk region and urged them to lay down their arms. The latter refused.