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Ukraine marks 25th independence day with show of anti-Russian force

By AFP - Aug 24,2016 - Last updated at Aug 24,2016

Ukrainian 2S19 Msta-S self-propelled howitzers drive during Ukraine’s independence day military parade in central Kiev, Ukraine, on Wednesday (Reuters photo)

KIEV — Tanks rumbled across Kiev on Tuesday as Ukraine marked 25 years of independence with a show of force against an increasingly assertive Russia and a war simmering in the pro-Kremlin separatist east.

Thousands of soldiers saluted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on the same square where a pro-EU revolution in 2014 ousted a Moscow-backed leader and left former master Russia fuming.

Poroshenko used Wednesday’s event to take a dig at Russian President Vladimir Putin for famously calling the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

“We were the ones who created what Putin later called the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe’,” Poroshenko declared in a speech to the nation as hundreds of Ukrainian blue and yellow flags fluttered in the damp wind.

“Looking back at more than two years of war, we can confidently say that our enemy failed to achieve a single goal — it was not able to bring Ukraine to its knees.”

 More than 9,500 people have died and two million forced from their homes in fighting between government forces and pro-Russian militias in two major industrial regions in the east that rebels now partially control.

Ukraine also lost its strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea when it was annexed by Russia on Putin’s orders in March 2014, shortly before the uprising in the east began.

Putin’s actions plunged the Kremlin’s relations with the West to a post-Cold War low that has complicated global attempts to find solutions to raging crises like the Syrian war.

But Russia has only ramped up its campaign to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad and this month escalated tensions with Ukraine by accusing it of plotting an incursion into Crimea.

 

Putin has repeatedly denied involvement in the separatist conflict and described Russians captured or spotted in the war zone as off duty soldiers and volunteers who were “following the call of their heart”.

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