Ukrainian police were in tense negotiations on Tuesday with an ex-con armed with explosives who took 20 people hostage on a bus and claimed to have planted a remote-controlled device in the western city of Lutsk.
Police cordoned off central Lutsk, 400 km (250 miles) from the capital Kyev, and asked residents not to leave their homes or workplaces.
Police said security services surrounded the bus after two shots were fired at it.
“The attacker threw a grenade from the bus, which fortunately did not detonate,” a statement said.
Video footage and images released by local media showed heavily armed police surrounding a blue and white bus with several broken windows and open curtains.
The attorney general’s office said the attacker claimed that there was a separate explosive device located in a public place in the city of about 200,000 residents that could be remotely detonated.
‘Bad Maxim’
The kidnapper initially contacted the police and identified himself as Maksym Plokhoy, a pseudonym that translates as “bad maxim,” said Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko.
Gerashchenko later said the man was identified as Maksym Kryvosh, 44, from Russia’s Orenburg region.
Kryvosh previously spent 10 years in prison for a variety of convictions, including fraud and illegal weapon handling, Gerashchenko said. He is believed to have undergone psychiatric treatment.
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Law enforcement officers were talking to Kryvosh in hopes of solving the crisis “through negotiations,” Gerashchenko said.
‘Anti-system’
Twitter deleted an account where posts by the name of Plokhoy claimed he was armed, even with explosives.
The tweets described him as “anti-system” and made demands on the authorities. The interior ministry said it believed the accounts were genuine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky described the hostage-taking as “disturbing”.
“Every effort is being made to resolve the situation without victims,” he said.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov came to the region to coordinate the response to the crisis.
Ukraine, which has been fighting against the Russian-backed separatists since 2014, has been fighting the proliferation of illegal weapons.
The fighting broke out between Kyev’s forces and Russia-backed separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk after Russia annexed the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. So far, more than 13,000 people have been killed in the fight.
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