Media: National Guard, Kherson battalion troops beat Crimean blockade activists (UPDATED)
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/media-national-guard-kherson-battalion-troops-beat-crimean-blockade-activi
About 100 Ukrainian National Guard troops and soldiers from the Kherson Battalion have beaten a group of activists enforcing an unofficial blockade of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory of Crimea, Ukrainian media reported on Nov. 21.
The troops were reported to have surrounded a group of activists near the town of Chaplynka, at the site of some high-voltage power line pylons reported to have been damaged by explosions in the early hours of Nov. 20.
According to Shevket Namatullaev, a journalist of the Crimean Tatar television channel ATR, the armed troops were beating the activists away from the area with their rifle butts. He said several Crimean Tatar activists had been injured.
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According to the spokeswoman of the National Guard of Ukraine, Svitlana Pavlovska, the National Guard has yet to arrive in the area. However, she said that the guardsmen had been ordered by the Interior Ministry to provide security while the power pylons are being repaired.
“In accordance with the Interior Ministry leadership’s decision, the National Guard has been sent to secure areas, along with the national police and other law enforcement agencies, where electrical supply lines were damaged in order to ensure and provide security while they’re being repaired,” Pavlovska told the Kyiv Post by phone.
“The National Guard hasn’t arrived yet to those areas. It has no orders that are related to the so-called blockade / roadblock of Crimea from the mainland,” she added.
Officials say the damage to the electricity pylons could threaten the power supply to 40 percent of Kherson and Mykolayiv oblasts, Ukrainian television channel 24 Kanal reported.
Crimean Tatar activists, along with fighters from the ultra-nationalist Right Sector organization, have been blockading the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula for several weeks, preventing heavy goods vehicles from entering the annexed Ukrainian territory.
