Ukrainian Police: 22 Officers Hospitalized After Clashes With Far-Right Activists
Police in Ukraine say that 22 officers were injured in clashes with far-right protesters who tried to attack a presidential motorcade ahead of this month’s election.
Some digging on the Russian embassy letter @PatelPatriot posted:
Originally set up as an alliance of ultra-nationalist groups in November 2013, the Right Sector became a political party in 2014 after toppling president Viktor Yanukovych. Its leader, Dmytro Yarosh. Ran for president in the election of May 2014. Yarosh is a follower of Stepan Bandera, a famed nationalist leader who fought Polish and Soviet rule in the 1930s and 1940s but was, in fact, a Nazi collaborator.
Right Sector members were involved in violent riots, police attacks throughout Jan and Feb of 2014. One of its leaders, Andriy Tarasenko, said they’re not interested in close relations with Europe but want to “build a nationalist Ukrainian state and stage a nationalist revolution”. Sounds like Antifa.
Another element of the nationalist movement responsible for the overthrow of Ukrainian president in 2014 are known as the nationalist Svoboda party. They ended up with significant roles in the new government: acting chief prosecutor, deputy prime minister and chairman of the National Security Council. NeoNazi chief prosecutor and NSC, what could go wrong with that?
Disgruntled, Mr Yarosh is reported to have sought the post of deputy prime minister in charge of security…after toppling the government. A drunken Right Sector activist wounded several people in central Kiev in March 2014, afterward the group left its city hqs, revealing caches of weapons. The Parliament later voted to disarm all paramilitary groups.
Right Sector has been involved in anti Russian actions in eastern Ukraine and are the primary reason actions were taken by Russia to provide security to ethnic Russians in the east.
Fast forward to 2019, during an annual women’s rally in Kiev, dozens of Right Sector besieged the women’s March attacking them, ripping signs away until police intervened. The attackers are masked, dressed in black and are very active. The “far-right groups operate with a high degree of impunity in Ukrainian society, allowing them to harass and attack minorities and human rights advocates without repercussions”. These groups are given wide berth due to their usefulness in the overthrow of the previous government. “Their anti-democratic ideals, paramilitary discipline, and freedom to operate, could have an outsize influence should Ukraine return to political instability.”
“Ukraine’s far-right groups, some of which include armed veterans of the war in Donbas, are an extremely controversial topic. And despite considerable stabilization in Ukrainian society over the past five years, the danger they pose appears to be growing.”
“scores of far-right activists belonging to the new National Corps party attacked the motorcade of President Petro Poroshenko in the Ukrainian city of Cherkasy, injuring 19 police officers. In the past year, far-right organizations have carried out over two dozen violent assaults on women’s groups, LGBT activists, and Roma encampments that have left many injured”
Sound familiar. These groups are aligned with fascism, Neo Nazism. “Even more important is their status as war heroes who formed private battalions and rushed to the front in 2014 to battle separatist rebels at a time when the Ukrainian Army was in serious disarray. As a result they enjoy connections with authorities, and a level of social respectability, that would probably not be the case otherwise.” “the fear among many here is that if Ukraine’s weak state institutions should again suffer any sort of breakdown, these highly organized, disciplined, armed, violence-prone, and ideologically determined groups might punch far above their weight in determining a political outcome.”
So when Tucker says Ukraine isn’t a democracy, he’s correct. From the mouths of the militia who drove the revolution “We are not democrats. We participate in elections only because they are a step to revolution,” says Artyom Skoropadskiy, press spokesman of the Right Sector party. “We want to change the whole system. New people, new order, new rules in the state system of Ukraine.
