Ukraine's acting president and prime minister offered some of their strongest pledges yet on Friday to strengthen constitutional rights to use the Russian language in a bid to defuse separatist protests. In a joint televised address, acting President Oleksander Turchinov and Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk called for national unity, urged people to refrain from violence and said they would support constitutional change, decentralizing more power to local councils, including over their official language - a key demand of Russian-speakers. Meanwhile, Russia said it was disappointed with the United States' assessment of an international deal to defuse the crisis in Ukraine, saying the threat of new sanctions against Moscow by Washington was "completely unacceptable." The Foreign Ministry in a statement accused U.S. officials of seeking to "whitewash" what it said was the use of force by Kiev's authorities against protesters in Ukraine's Russian-speaking eastern provinces. For his part, Russia's envoy to the European Union said the authorities in Kiev had incorrectly interpreted an international deal to resolve the crisis in Ukraine, where rebellions have broken out in Russian-speaking eastern provinces. "If we are speaking about how the Geneva document is being interpreted in Kiev by the current authorities, then unfortunately they understood this incorrectly," Vladimir Chizhov told the Russian state television Rossiya-24. "In particularly that it only applies to the eastern and southern provinces and those who are demanding federalism, but it not to Kiev, where (it thinks) everything is legal including the ongoing occupation of Maidan (Independence Square)" This comes as the self-declared leader of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Denis Pushilin, said that he did not consider his men to be bound by an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to disarm and vacate occupied buildings.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei "Lavrov did not sign anything for us, he signed on behalf of the Russian Federation," Pushilin, head of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, told journalists in Donetsk.
Pushilin said his men will only consider leaving public buildings when the government in Kiev does the same. He said he was continuing preparations for a referendum on increased autonomy from Kiev on May 11. REUTERS