East and west, Ukraine rival camps dig in

[newthinking]

By Alastair Macdonald and Aleksandar Vasovic
KIEV/DONETSK, Ukraine Fri Apr 18, 2014 2:29pm EDT

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/18/us-ukraine-crisis-camps-idUSBREA3H0NS20140418

(Reuters) - If armies march on their stomachs, then Ukraine's rival protest camps could be in for a long campaign, judging by the cooks hard at work behind the barricades in Kiev and Donetsk on Friday.

A day after Ukraine and Russia agreed that protest sit-ins must end, pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine said they would not quit occupied public buildings and pro-Western activists in the capital insisted they would not dismantle their Maidan camp, which helped topple the Kremlin-backed president.

Though among a relatively small hard core of impassioned partisans on either side, the cooks in Kiev and Donetsk, and the mirror-image paramilitary camps that have sprung up on opposing sides of the country pose a conundrum for the European monitors charged under the Geneva agreement with implementing a peace.

In Donetsk and close to a dozen other towns in the east, the lessons of the Maidan appear to have been learned. Similar walls of tyres, barbed wire, bric-a-brac and sandbags have sprung up.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/18/us-ukraine-crisis-camps-idUSBREA3H0NS20140418