TWO people were killed and a dozen injured yesterday by a bomb that exploded at a march in Kharkiv to mark last year’s ousting of president Viktor Yanukovych.

The Interior Ministry said that one of the two killed in the city, about 25 miles from the Russian border, was a police officer.

In Kiev, thousands marched to mark a year since the coup against Mr Yanukovych.

The elected president was forced out of office on February 22 2014 after months of increasingly violent protests in Kiev by pro-EU groups backed by a mob of right-wing thugs, including many who openly idolise nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

The presidents of the European Union, Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Georgia attended to show their support for the fascist-backed government in the country’s capital.

The previous evening, resistance forces in the east of the country conducted a prisoner swap with government forces as part of a ceasefire agreement.

Rebels handed over 139 troops and the government released 52 prisoners, according to a rebel official overseeing the swap near the village of Zholobok, about 12 miles west of Lugansk.

An agreement signed last week in Minsk, Belarus, calls for the exchange of all prisoners.

It is unclear how many captives each side holds but Donetsk rebels have said that Kiev’s forces have been holding about 580 of their number.

A spokesman for the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said that less than half of the 52 handed back to them were civilians and many showed signs of mistreatment.