MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) - Three months after the tragic events in Odesa, which claimed the lives of at least 48 people and injured over 200, commemoration ceremonies arranged by local anti-fascist organizations were held in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, Warsaw, Dublin, Sophia and other cities of the world on Saturday.
“We always hope for the better and now see that the perception of the situation in Ukraine is changing. They are waking up and start seeing the truth. This inspires hope,” one of the organizers of the event held in front of Colosseum in Rome told RIA Novosti.
The event in Rome aimed to attract European audience’s attention to the events unfolding in Ukraine and was organized by the Italian anti-communist and anti-fascist organization The Women of Donbas.
In Sofia, Bulgarian capital, the activists of Together with Russia organization also sought to influence the coverage of the Ukrainian crisis in local media. According to the head of the organization Dimitar Dimitrov, the commemorating aimed to attract media attention so that “the journalists show and tell Bulgarians that this [Odesa tragedy] happened.”
Dimitrov added that media coverage started to change recently and “two points of view are presented now – Western and Eastern.”
“Often biased, but now they present the Russian point of view. It was much more one-sided before,” he said.
On May 2, clashes in Odesa broke out between pro-federalization activists and fans of the Odesa and Kharkiv football teams, later joined by Euromaidan activists. Pro-Kiev radicals, joined by Right Sector gunmen, blocked the anti-government protesters in the House of Trade Unions and set the building on fire with the help of Molotov cocktails.
According to official data, 48 people died in the fire but local officials insist the authorities in Kiev covered up the actual death toll of at least 116.
A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexander Lukashevich said last month that Kiev was deliberately hampering the investigation into the tragedy, as well as into other cases of human rights violations in Ukraine.
