Ukraine jumps on ‘Je suis Charlie’ bandwagon

Kiev promotes its war against Russian backed separatists, creating its own variant of the Twitter hashtag that took social media by storm last week after Paris terror attacks.

JANUARY 15, 2015 16:57

Ukraine jumped of the "Je Suis Charlie" (photo credit: FACEBOOK) — Ukraine jumped of the "Je Suis Charlie"

(photo credit: FACEBOOK)

Ukraine jumped on the #JeSuis bandwagon to promote its war against Russian backed separatists, creating its own variant of the Twitter hashtag that took social media by storm after last week’s attacks at a newspaper and Jewish grocery store in Paris.

“Please share [this image] to make the world know our plea for support in fighting terrorism from DNR-LNR,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko wrote on Facebook Wednesday evening, in reference to the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the country’s east.

Poroshenko’s post, which more than 9,000 people shared, showed an image of a bus shattered by gunfire above the tagline “je suis Volnovakha.”

On Tuesday, 12 people were killed on a bus near the town of Volnovakha. Kiev blamed the separatists, asserting that they had been attacked by rebels using Grad rocket launchers while it was carrying civilians through a government checkpoint.

Separatists denied responsibility, saying the bus had been attacked by small arms fire rather than a missile or a shell.

Kiev, which has termed its offensive to retake rebel held areas of eastern Ukraine as an anti-terrorism operation, declared Thursday as a “day of mourning for the people murdered by terrorists.”

A spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Embassy in Tel Aviv distributed a link to a YouTube video showing what she said was separatist Grad rocket fire on the checkpoint.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post from a displaced persons camp in Zhitomir several months ago, Chana Gopin, the wife of the Chabad emissary in Luhansk, compared both sides of the conflict to Hamas, accusing both rebels and government forces of shelling civilian areas indiscriminately.

In October Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting several instances in which the Ukrainian army allegedly fired cluster munitions into civilian areas.

Ukraine’s civil war has killed more than 4,700 people since last April.

Reuters contributed to this report.