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MOSCOW (Reuters) - The presence of armed men in the streets of the capital of Ukraine’s breakaway Luhansk region is an attempted coup by a fired local police chief, Igor Plotnitsky, the head of the self-styled “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LNR), said on Wednesday.

Plotnitsky sacked Igor Kornet, the local interior minister, on Monday.

“How else can you call the situation when the person fired by court from his job is attempting to conduct some operations by force? This an attempt to seize power,” Plotnitsky’s website quoted him as saying during a meeting with reporters.