The Fifth Column on Ukraine’s Front Line - The Daily Beast
▻http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/24/the-fifth-column-on-ukraine-s-front-line.html
From time to time one of the demonstrators in the group will turn around, spit, utter a sizzling curse work and flip a middle finger at a nearby tent camp that Ukrainian patriots have decorated with the blue and yellow national flags. “Don’t think we are old and sick, there are hundreds of thousands of us, a majority of Mariupol,” a middle-aged man on crutches, sputtering through missing teeth, tells The Daily Beast. “But it is too dangerous for our young supporters to come out on this square, they immediately get thrown in jail.”
The commandant of the nearby tent camp, Vladimir Kisel, tells The Daily Beast that this gathering of “the fifth column” a few steps away is a bigger problem for Mariupol than one might think. “Over 50 percent of the population in Mariupol population has separatist views today. They are very aggressive.” Kisel stretched out his arm to show a blue and yellow bracelet around his wrist. “They can cut my hand off for this,” he said.
So the potential for internal unrest grows as war continues, bit by bit, to encroach on the city’s external defenses.