At the beginning of ATO Ukrainian military were afraid to shoot, – Turchynov

In the beginning of the ATO the Ukrainian army had to make to fight, said Turchinov.

The main issue in the beginning of the antiterrorist operation was the fact that the Ukrainian military were afraid to shoot, said Secretary of national security Council and defense Oleksandr Turchynov, who in April 2014 he held the position of acting President of Ukraine.

“When I started anti-terrorist operation, the main problem was to get the Ukrainian military to fight. The armed forces were afraid to shoot. Many commanders since then have thought: and suddenly will come back the old regime, and here we are “lit up,” said he in an interview to the BBC-Ukraine.

According to the current Secretary of the NSDC, the people were not ready to fight, and they had to cross a psychological barrier.

“In these circumstances I gathered the leadership of the General staff and the security forces, took the card, held with a Sharpie a line from the Village Lugansk to Mariupol via Slavyansk and said, “It will be a line where there should be no single enemy, no separatist, to build along the defense. The defense Ministry called this line the “line T” from my surname”, – said Turchinov.

He added that after the decision of the Ukrainian army cleared all of the separatists who remained in the rear, and began to compress the ring in the Donbas.

“And here, in April, the line started to turn into a real front line. Started a serious war – I mean the fighting under the Slavic, in the area of Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, the battle for Mariupol”, – said the NSDC Secretary.

He also stressed that without direct Russian intervention, the Ukrainian army would have until the end of may to liberate the entire territory of Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

“At first we used against MANPADS and mortars, and then the whole Arsenal of Russian weapons: “Buki”, “Grad”, “Smerch”, tanks, heavy artillery and the like. Almost in the middle of may we were already a full-fledged war” – summed Turchinov.

13 APR 2014 in the Donbas anti-terrorist operation began. On this day, the militant group Strelkova-Girkin took Slavyansk.

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