Kiev proxies perpetrated the worst carnage of the day
Later in the day, the pro-Kiev forces attack a large stone building, five stories tall, with a colonnaded front entrance that is barricaded by its defenders. The attackers dismantle and burn an encampment in front of the building, dismantling a speaker's platform and towers for lights and sound equipment. This is Odessa's Trade Unions House and it is under siege, surrounded by a scattered, bustling crowd of hundreds of mostly armed men. Some throw stones at the defenders. Shots are fired. Farther back are thin ranks of hundreds of onlookers, many passively taking pictures. It appears to be a scene of relentless, low-intensity but extreme vandalism.
Later, the barricade is gone and no defenders are visible in front of the building. The pro-Kiev attackers have set fire to perhaps a dozen tents in front of the building and they burn into the night. Flames twenty feet high engulf the entrance to the Trade Unions House. Intense flames rage inside the ground floor and thick, black smoke pours out of windows on several floors (it looks like a stairwell on fire). There are people inside the building, fifty reportedly trapped on the roof. In the twilight, police arrive quietly, in formation, without reaction from the crowd. The police don't do much. Wounded or dead victims are dragged or wheeled about, or left lying on the pavement. No one fights any of the fires. There are more occasional shots or small explosions to which no one visibly reacts. There is no sign that people inside the building are fighting back. The crowd gets noisy when more than half a dozen people from inside the building appear along a narrow ledge, between smoking windows. Some of the onlookers have moved one of the light and sound towers next to the building, allowing people on the ledge to climb down the pipe framing, with police surrounding the base.
In another tape, someone throws a Molotov cocktail that hits the side of the building and burns on a ledge. A heavyset man in a blue uniform shoots his pistol at the building. A man crouches on a ledge above the crowd as smoke and flames pour from a window to his right. Someone throws a Molotov cocktail that burns on the ledge on the other side of the window. Later the man is gone. If any of the dozens of men in uniform are police, they are doing nothing to control the crowd. A crawling, wounded man is kicked from behind. There are other wounded people, some getting medical attention (officially, more than 200 were wounded during the day).
At dusk, some people start rescuing those trapped in the building
At one window of the Trade Unions House is the Ukrainian flag. Two people hang onto the outside of a window frame of a smoking third-floor window. At another window there are flames inside. People are leaning out of other third floor windows. Someone throws a Molotov cocktail at them, but misses. The crowd remains quiet, ignoring explosions. Drumming begins in the distance and lasts a few minutes. A rescue effort using ropes and a sound/light tower and a ladder takes almost half an hours, but frees several people from the third floor. The second floor continues to burn nearby, but another ladder allows a few more people to escape from a smoking window. A man in a white helmet climbs a ladder to a third floor window and leads more people down. Firefighters in white helmets have extinguished the blaze at the front door. There are still hundreds of people in front of the building, but they are quiet, and the tent fires have burned out. It is dark. What light there is comes mostly from flashing emergency vehicles.
In the aftermath, inside the Trade Unions House , a 14-minute video travels with what appear to be police officers walking through a series of offices that have been trashed, but are not burned. The "officers" occasionally rummage through papers, but ignore the occasional, apparently lifeless body. Outside, in the dark, people are milling about, occasionally calling out, sometimes laughing, mostly quiet until a group starts to chant in the distance.
This fragmentary and non-linear impression of events in Odessa is based predominantly on several hours of video for which there is no reliable verification (or discrediting). The cumulative effect of seeing many of the same moments from different angles lends credence to the reality of what is shown. Little if any of it could have been staged without great effort that surely someone would have noticed. It's hard to find a credible and detailed account of that day's events anywhere, never mind in mainstream media [the best I have seen so far are by RT (several) and the BBC on May 6].
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