Pro-Russian militants -- boasting that they do not take orders from Washington or Moscow -- refused to end their armed occupation of a dozen government buildings across eastern Ukraine today (April 18, 2014), upending hopes for a quick end to the standoff, according to the Washington Post website.
The defiance came just hours after Russia, the European Union, Ukraine, and the United States sought to de-escalate the conflict with an agreement signed in Geneva, Switzerland urging restraint on all sides and calling on the pro-Russia activists to lay down their arms and walk away from their barricades at the city halls and police stations.
Denis Pushilin -- a leader of a group calling itself the Donetsk People's Republic -- said today that he and his men had no intention of abandoning their positions as long as the new government in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, still stood.
"It is an illegal junta," Anatoliy Onischenko -- another separatist leader in Ukraine -- said of the Kiev government. "They should leave their buildings first."
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