KIEV – A fire at a union hall amid political clashes Friday in the southern city of Odessa caused 38 deaths, Ukraine’s provisional government said.“Thirty-eight people died as a result of the fire: eight of them jumped out the windows on finding themselves trapped and the rest were asphyxiated,” the interior ministry said in a statement.
Another 50 people were hurt in the blaze, including 10 members of the security forces, the statement said.
Four people were killed earlier Friday in Odessa during violent confrontations between supporters and opponents of the government in Kiev.
One of the four died of a gunshot wound, a police source said.
Three police officers were among at least a dozen other people hurt as Kiev loyalists and their mainly Russian-speaking opponents battled each other with clubs, stones and other rudimentary weapons.
Rowdy supporters of the local soccer club took part in the clash on the pro-Kiev side.
The anti-Kiev protesters took refuge in the union hall shortly before the fire broke out.
Russia’s RT television said the blaze was deliberately set by members of Right Sector, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist group affiliated with the government in Kiev.
The disturbances in Odessa, Ukraine’s third-largest city, came hours after Ukrainian armed forces launched a military operation to wrest control of the southeastern city of Sloviansk from ethnic-Russian militias opposed to the Kiev government.
Ukraine’s interior ministry said two of its helicopters were shot down by missiles during the operation.
Two military personnel were killed and seven others wounded, the head of the provisional government, Oleksander Turchinov, said, adding that the insurgents suffered “significant losses.”
Sloviansk has been blockaded by the Ukrainian troops, who have deployed a score of helicopters in their offensive, militia leader Igor Strelkov said.
Long-simmering tensions between pro-European western Ukraine and the country’s eastern region, which has close ties with Russia, were exacerbated by the ouster in late February of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian-speaker from the East.
The crisis that led to Yanukovych’s ouster erupted at the end of November, when Yanukovych backed away from plans to ink a pact with the European Union and instead signed a $15 billion financial-aid package with Russia.
Brussels’ offer of closer ties with EU was conditioned on a pledge by Ukraine not to enter into any additional economic accords with Russia, Kiev’s leading trade partner and energy supplier.
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