Two people were killed and about a dozen injured when a bomb exploded in Ukraine’s second-largest city at a march on to mark the first anniversary of the ousting of president Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s interior ministry said.

The ministry said Sunday’s blast in the government-held eastern city of Kharkiv was due to an “unknown explosive device” and was being considered a terrorist act. A police officer was one of the dead, it said.



Markian Lubkivskyi, an aide to the head of Ukraine’s SBU security service, said four suspects had been arrested.

“They are Ukrainian citizens, who underwent instruction and received weapons in the Russian Federation, in Belgorod,” he told Ukraine’s 112 Television. Belgorod is a Russian city just across the border from Kharkiv.

Moscow did not immediately respond to the accusations. It has long denied aiding its militant sympathisers in Ukraine.

The bomb in Kharkiv struck one of the many events across Ukraine on Sunday to mark the deaths a year ago of 100 protesters in an uprising that toppled the Moscow-backed president.

“Today is memorial Sunday, but on this day terrorist scum revealed its predatory nature,” Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, said on Facebook.

The violence comes as Ukraine continues to be riven by tension and bloodshed stemming from Yanukovych’s fall a year ago. The Ukrainian parliament voted on 22 February 2014 to remove the pro-Russia president, following months of increasingly violent protests in the capital, Kiev.

The Crimean peninsula, where residents largely regarded his downfall as a coup, was annexed by Russia a month later. Then armed rebels opposed to the new authorities in Kiev took over large parts of two regions bordering Russia, setting off a conflict in which more than 5,600 people have died.

A peace plan envisioning a ceasefire and pullback of heavy weapons was signed 10 days ago, but violations ot the truce continue.

Ukraine plans to begin pulling back heavy weaponry from the front lines on Sunday in accordance with the peace plan, a military spokesman said. Ukrainian military spokesman Col Andriy Lysenko told a briefing that the withdrawal was to begin, but did not give further details.

Rebel spokesman Eduard Basurin said the pullback from both sides was to take place between Sunday and 7 March, but he did not specify whether rebels had yet made any moves. There was no immediate confirmation that the withdrawal had begun.

Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian rebels exchange prisoners. Guardian





At least 139 Ukrainian soldiers were freed in a prisoner swap with pro-Russia forces outside of rebel-controlled Luhansk late on Saturday.

Kiev exchanged 52 pro-Russia rebels for 140 Ukrainian soldiers, according to Viktor Medvedchuk, a special representative of the Ukrainian security service for humanitarian issues in eastern Ukraine who has acted as a mediator with the rebels. The website of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said 54 rebels had been exchanged.

President Poroshenko wrote on his Facebook page that 139 soldiers had been freed, including some involved in the fierce defence of Donetsk airport and others who had fought in the strategic town of Debaltseve.

An “all-for-all” prisoner swap is one of the steps of the peace plan agreed by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in Minsk on 12 February. Daria Morozova, the human rights ombudswoman for the Donetsk People’s Republic, said complications with lists of names to be traded were preventing an all-for-all exchange but promised that small swaps would continue.



Svyatoslav Tsegolko, Poroshenko’s aide, said one more soldier would be freed in the coming days. Medvedchuk said criminal charges had to be withdrawn and documents found for all those to be released by Kiev’s forces, which was delaying the process.

Representatives of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is monitoring the implementation of the peace plan, were not present at the prisoner swap, said Medvedchuk, whose daughter’s godfather is reportedly Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. The Guardian saw several Ukrainian prisoners taken in a bus from a rebel base in Donetsk for the prisoner swap on Saturday.

Later that night, the warring parties came to a field outside of Luhansk, and the prisoners walked across to the other side. At least one injured rebel was taken across on a stretcher. The column of buses from Luhansk was temporarily delayed by fears that the road ahead could be mined, journalists travelling with it reported.

The peace plan has been proceeding but not without hitches. A ceasefire that came into effect on 15 February has been frequently violated, including during the rebel capture last week of the rail hub Debaltseve, where several thousand Ukrainian soldiers were forced to retreat after being virtually cut off from the main lines.



On Sunday, Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky, the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, approved a plan with a representative of Moscow to pull back heavy weapons beginning on Monday, said Pyotr Kanonik of the Joint Coordinating Centre for Ceasefire Control.

The withdrawal plans “may be solved separately” for the contentious area of Debaltseve, Kanonik told the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper. Poroshenko insisted during the Minsk talks that Debaltseve was not surrounded, which would mean his forces would withdraw to a more advantageous position, while Putin said Debaltseve was cut off and therefore not under Ukrainian control.

Officials from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics said last week they were starting to withdraw heavy weapons from the frontline to meet the second step of the peace plan, which foresees the creation of a buffer zone up to 140 kilometres (87 miles) wide. But the OSCE later said it had seen only movement of heavy weapons, not their withdrawal.

On Saturday, rebels allowed an OSCE monitoring team into Debaltseve for the first time, where it documented shortages of water, food, gas, electricity and medicine. During the half-hour the team was in the city, it heard intense shelling, including about 100 outgoing shots and a few incoming, it said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had delivered five trucks of food, medical supplies and other essential items to the 5,000 people left in Debaltseve, where it said the humanitarian situation is “dire”.

According to a Ukrainian military spokesman, rebels attacked Kiev’s forces in the town of Shirokyne, a hotspot near the government-held coastal city of Mariupol, with a tank and automatic grenade launchers on Sunday. One soldier was killed and one wounded in a similar attack on Saturday.

Kiev also claimed that two Russian military reconnaissance planes flew over the area. After the fall of Debaltseve, concerns have risen that pro-Russia forces could threaten Mariupol, which holds important metallurgical plants and was briefly under their control in May.