by Our Foreign Desk

UKRAINIAN progressives laid flowers and lit candles on Saturday in front of the trade union building in Odessa where more than 40 people died a year ago when the building was torched by rabid rightwingers.

In a clash between supporters and opponents of Ukraine’s putchist government, 48 people died and more than 200 were wounded on May 2 2014. 

It began with fights between two factions marching in the city and reached a grisly culmination at the trade union building, where supporters of autonomy for Ukraine’s industrial east took shelter from assaults by government-backing fascists.

The government supporters threw fire bombs at the building which set it alight. Many in the building choked to death on smoke while others were killed in falls from windows.

“It is a tragedy for the whole country because people did not die by accident, people who stood up for their ideas died,” one Odessa resident said yesterday.

Kiev government accounts claim, incredibly, that those who took shelter in the building could have set it on fire themselves by throwing fire bombs from the roof at their opponents. 

More than 1,000 courageous demonstrators gathered in the right-wing heartland of Kiev for another commemoration, some of them carrying signs saying “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive.” And another memorial gathering with flowers and candles took place outside the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow, where Russian supporters came together to remember their fallen Ukrainian comrades.

Russia and the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine point to the conflagration in Odessa in support of their claims that Ukraine came under the malign influence of fascists after President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country last year.

In Donetsk, separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko decried the Odessa deaths with typical bluntness as the work of “crowds of brutal nazis.”

“On that day, we and all the citizens of Odessa understood that there is no more a country called Ukraine. It is dead for us, together with dozens of tortured Odessa residents,” he said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s leading human-rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov criticised Ukrainian authorities for conducting only “quasi-investigations” into the violence.