Eastern Ukrainian regions implementing plan ‘to destabilize situation’ — Yatsenyuk

Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking eastern regions were putting into practice a plan “to destabilize the situation” in the country, parliament-appointed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a government session on Monday.

Parliament-appointed Interior Minister "Arsen Avakov has left for Kharkiv, while Vitaly Yarema, First Deputy Prime Minister responsible for security and law enforcement sectors, is in Donetsk,” he said.Yatsenyuk dubbed several thousand-strong rallies, held in regional capitals Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv, as actions which “represent 1,000 to 1,500 people with a specific Russian accent”. The prime minister said the government had “a clear plan as to how to react to the situation”.

The members of the regional legislature in Ukraine’s industrial center of Donetsk have proclaimed the city Donetsk People’s Republic, local mass media reported earlier.