All it took was a steel cable and a set of very strong front teeth.
A Ukrainian pediatrician on Friday pulled five streetcars over a distance of 14m in a stunt in Lviv aimed at drawing attention to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The 38-tonne weight was pulled by 34-year-old Oleg Skavysh — a Ukrainian famous for a series of similar toothy feats.
Photo: EPA
Pro-Moscow gunmen that Ukraine’s Western-backed government suspects were actually Russian soldiers seized the Crimean parliament on Feb. 27, 2014, and decided to hold an independence referendum in May that year.
Russian military forces stationed in the Crimean port of Sevastopol seized control of the Black Sea peninsula over the course of the subsequent few weeks.
Crimeans overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in a March 16, 2014, poll that has since only been recognized by a handful of states, such as Syria and North Korea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin formally annexed Crimea on March 18.
The UN General Assembly voted by a near-unanimous margin to proclaim the annexation as illegal on March 27 of that year.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Friday vowed once again to eventually force Russia to return the strategic region of about 2 million people that has been a popular resort destination since Soviet times.
He also ordered his government to develop a detailed plan of how Ukraine could defend its case in international courts.
“Crimea was, is and will remain an integral part of the Ukrainian state, and the thieving nation will have to return what it stole,” Poroshenko said in a statement.
“Russia has substantially boosted its military presence in the region ... that is posing a threat — including a nuclear one — not just to Ukraine, but to all the countries of the Black Sea region,” Poroshenko added.
Russia has stationed new warplanes and deployed additional troops to back up its existing naval base in Crimea.
However, it has repeatedly denied plans to move some of its nuclear-tipped missiles to the region.
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