Home > 20- ENGLISH - MATERIAL AND REVOLUTION > EU and Ukrainian regime seek to discipline fascist Right Sector

EU and Ukrainian regime seek to discipline fascist Right Sector

Sunday 6 April 2014, by Max

EU and Ukrainian regime seek to discipline fascist Right Sector

By Stefan Steinberg and Chris Marsden

The European Union and the unelected Western-backed regime in Ukraine are intensifying their efforts to bring the fascist Right Sector under state control in the run-up to presidential elections planned for May 25.

For the past week, Right Sector members have been besieging the Ukrainian parliament demanding the resignation of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whom they blame for the death of Right Sector deputy leader Alexander Muzychko. Muzychko, also known as Sasha Bilyi, was gunned down by police on March 24 in Rivne, in an action that has all the hallmarks of a contract killing ordered by the Ukrainian state.

The Right Sector played a key role in the Maidan protests that culminated in the ousting of the pro-Russian regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. They crushed Yanukovych’s riot police and, during the putsch, surrounded Ukrainian state buildings and terrorized the state apparatus and parliamentarians of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into supporting the Western-backed opposition.

A significant proportion of the $5 billion funnelled to opposition groups by Washington will have gone to bolstering the disparate fascistic outfits that make up the Right Sector. Its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, has acknowledged that his organisation successfully “recruited” members of the army and security forces in the weeks when the Maidan protests occurred.

Since the deposing of Yanukovych on February 22, however, the ties between the supposedly new and “democratic” regime installed by Washington and fascist bands has become increasingly problematic.

Thugs beating up politicians, stirring up anti-Russian chauvinism, and carrying out various criminal acts while sporting weapons and Nazi symbols too obviously contradicted the Western powers’ cynical claims that the Maidan protests were a democratic revolution. The imperialist powers saw it as a major factor in strengthening the hand of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While they moved to incorporate the fascists as a key basis of the new regime, the Ukrainian opposition and its imperialist backers have increasingly sought to discipline Right Sector and more closely bind it to their agenda.

Yarosh was offered the post of deputy head of the National Security Council by the transitional regime, to serve under Andrey Parubiy, a co-founder of Svoboda’s forerunner, the Social National Party of Ukraine. Yarosh turned down the request in order to run for the post of president of Ukraine, however.

The entire Right Sector was then urged to disarm and take their place in a newly created National Guard and to end their independent activity—which they have so far refused to do.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph on March 28 attributed the origins of this demand to the European Union. It reported that the EU is “deeply worried that the situation is playing into the Kremlin’s hands. The Telegraph has learnt that two recent EU communiqués on Ukraine were supposed to include a clause demanding ‘the dissolution of paramilitary structures’. Officials then deleted the clause, because of fears it would provide a ‘propaganda coup’ to President Vladimir Putin.”

Deleted clauses notwithstanding, the EU’s guiding hand is clear. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton has condemned the Right Sector protests outside the building of the Verkhovna Rada as “against the democratic principles and rule of law.” She insisted that the fascists “need to hand over any unauthorised arms to the authorities immediately.”

To underscore Ashton’s message, following their meeting at the end of March in Weimar, the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France, and Poland issued a joint appeal requesting the Ukrainian government “distance itself from extremist groups,” arguing that such a move was necessary in order to “re-establish the state monopoly on the use of force.”

The Ukraine regime has heeded its masters’ voice. Referring to the Right Sector, Ukrainian MP Serhiy Sobolev told France 24 this week, “We have to be clear—if this is a political party it should focus on political activity... If these are combatants who want to serve their country, they can do so in the army or in the new National Guard.”

Avakov offered the Right Sector an opportunity to go to the front lines in the confrontation with Russia: “We told them, the war is finished. If you would like to participate in defending the country, go and join the National Guard of Ukraine.”

Calling upon the Right Sector to end their occupation of several buildings in central Kiev, Avakov advised them to “Go to the border regions in Ukraine and secure Ukraine.”

The killing of Muzychko was a clear warning to the fascists of the potential price of failing to heed to call to work under the supervision of the state. He was famously captured on video threatening the representatives of a regional parliament with violence and death. An official inquiry this week brazenly ruled that he accidentally shot and killed himself in the heart as police tried to wrestle him to the ground.

On Tuesday the Ukrainian parliament used an incident the day before to pass a resolution ordering the Ukrainian security service (SBU) and the interior ministry to disarm paramilitaries.

In the incident, a member of Right Sector was involved in a shooting near the city centre on Monday evening that wounded three people. The man was arrested and his group were ordered to leave the hotel in the centre of Kiev they had turned into their headquarters. Armed police officers then surrounded the headquarters of Right Sector at the Hotel Dnipro in the city centre.

The abandoning of the Right Sector’s hotel base hardly constitutes an end to its independent activity. It still possesses substantial weaponry, which it reportedly acquired from an Interior Ministry depot—though it remains unclear whether they were given the weapons by sections of the security apparatus during the protests, in the run-up to the putsch. The Right Sector has largely ignored a government deadline to hand over its arms.

In any event, despite banner headlines such as the BBC’s “Kiev takes on the Far Right”, neither the Ukraine regime nor its backers in the United States and Europe have any problem with collaborating with right-wing and fascist forces. They do not seek the elimination of the Right Sector, but its incorporation into the state under their orders.

In addition, no less than six leading posts, including deputy premier, in the new regime are occupied by members of Svoboda. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is the nominee of Fatherland whose figurehead, Yulia Timoschenko, has called for the nuclear liquidation of Russians living in Ukraine.

The newly appointed head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is Valentine Nalyvaichenko. Photos available on the Internet show him addressing the annual rally of the "Trident" organization—the faction of the Right Sector headed by Yarosh, who is pictured alongside Nalyvaichenko—in 2011. The meeting was convened on the grounds of Zarvanitsa, the main complex of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

These are the forces, which according to the wishes of the EU and US State Department, are to be entrusted in Ukraine with the “state monopoly of force.”

Forum posts

  • Wave of assassinations in Ukraine targets critics of Kiev regime

    In the lead-up to the May 9 celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, there has been an accelerating wave of political assassinations targeting critics of the Western-backed, far-right regime in Kiev.
    Yesterday evening, a group calling itself the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—the name of a Ukrainian fascist militia that collaborated with Nazi forces in carrying out ethnic genocides of Jews and Poles during World War II—claimed responsibility for the killings. In a statement emailed to opposition legislators and political commentators, it also gave “anti-Ukrainian” persons 72 hours to leave the country or be killed if they stayed behind.

    It pledged to carry out the “complete extermination” of enemies of Ukraine and a “merciless insurrectionary struggle against the anti-Ukrainian regime of traitors and Moscow toadies,” according to a report in Der Spiegel.

    The killing spree began this week with the murder of journalist Sergey Sukhobok. On Wednesday evening, Oleg Kalashnykov was found dead in his home in Kiev. He was a former parliamentarian from the Party of Regions and a close ally of President Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian politician ousted in a NATO-backed, fascist-led putsch last February that installed the current regime in Kiev.

    According to Interior Ministry advisor Anton Heraschenko, killers were waiting for Kalashnykov outside his residence and shot him when he returned.

    Before his death, Kalashnykov indicated that he had received death threats over his call to commemorate May 9. He addressed a letter to his friends warning that “open genocide on dissent, death threats, and constant dirty insults” had become the “norm” since he publicly raised the issue. He reportedly added in the letter that Ukraine was under Nazi occupation.
    On Thursday, pro-Russian journalist Oles Buzyna was shot and killed near his house in Kiev by two unidentified masked gunmen firing from a car. Buzyna had edited the Segodnya newspaper, a pro-Russian publication financed by Ukraine’s richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, a multi-billionaire who was also one of the leading sponsors of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions. Also killed on Thursday was Neteshinskiy Vestnik editor Olga Moroz.
    The killings were the latest in a spate of deaths of high-profile opponents of the Kiev regime. The victims have largely been political and media associates of the faction of the post-Soviet Ukrainian business oligarchy tied to Akhmetov, Yanukovych, and the Kremlin oligarchy in Russia. Other deaths include:

    * Aleksey Kolesnik, former chairman of the Kharkov regional government, found hanged on January 29;

    *Stanislav Melnik, a Party of Regions member reportedly close to Akhmetov, found shot in the bathroom of his Kiev apartment on February 24;

    *Sergey Valter, the mayor of Melitopol, found hanged before his trial on February 25, leaving no suicide note;

    *Aleksandr Bordyuga, the deputy chief of Melitopol police, found dead the next day, in his garage;

    *Mikhail Chechetov, a former member of the Party of Regions, who jumped from the window of his 17th floor apartment in Kiev on February 28, leaving a suicide note;
    *Sergey Melnichuk, a prosecutor who fell from a 9th floor apartment in Odessa on March 14.
    Russian and Ukrainian officials traded accusations of responsibility in the killings. Speaking on a call-in television show, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and said of Buzyna’s killing, “It is not the first political assassination, we have seen a series of such killings in Ukraine.”

    Officials in Kiev offered up dubious arguments to blame the killings on Russia. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the killings “a deliberate provocation which plays into the hands of our enemies, destabilizing the political situation in Ukraine.”

    In the meantime, officials and far-right parliamentarians in Kiev openly endorsed and celebrated the murders. While lawmaker Borys Filatov rejoiced that “one more piece of sh*t” had been eliminated,” Irina Farion, a lawmaker of the fascist Svoboda Party, attacked Buzyna as a “degenerate” and hoped that his “death will somehow neutralize the dirt this [expletive] has spilled. ... Such ones go to history’s sewers.”

    Political responsibility for the killings rests with the imperialist powers that oversaw and backed the Kiev putsch. They have encouraged Kiev to wage a bloody civil war against pro-Russian regions of east Ukraine and have covered up its reliance on fascistic, anti-Russian forces. In the resulting political atmosphere, opponents of the Kiev states can be murdered without investigation and with political impunity.

    What is occurring in Ukraine is a warning to the international working class. With the support of Washington and its European allies, which are moving to train the neo-Nazi militias which make up much of the Ukrainian regime’s National Guard, an ultra-right regime has emerged in a major European country.

    With Ukraine’s economy disintegrating and its population resisting Kiev’s attempts to reinstate the draft to wage war against east Ukraine, Kiev is seeking to crush domestic dissent and rely ever more directly on the far right. Terrified that mass opposition might coalesce around the May 9 holiday, it has banned public discussion of communism. It also rehabilitated the UPA and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

    This is the culmination of a series of police-state measures by the Kiev regime that have enjoyed the full support of its NATO backers. During last year’s Ukrainian legislative elections, opposition candidates including Pyotr Symonenko, the Stalinist Communist Party of Ukraine’s (KPU) former presidential candidate, were physically attacked by fascist thugs.
    Even before the murder of Buzyna, Kiev regime officials and sympathizers were demanding draconian punishments of journalists who oppose the regime. Last month, Ukrainian Minister of Information Policy Yuri Stets demanded that journalists in the breakaway east Ukrainian Donbass region serve prison terms of eight to 15 years.

    In an account on Facebook of a speech he had given at Harvard University, pro-Kiev regime commentator and political analyst Yuri Romanenko boasted that he had argued for murdering pro-Russian journalists and summarized his arguments:

    “The Ukrainian army must selectively and carefully eliminate Russian journalists covering the situation in Donbass. We need to direct Ukrainian army snipers to shoot people wearing PRESS helmets, making them priority targets,” Romanenko wrote. “Since the media represent a destructive weapon and allow Russia to operate not only in the war zone but across Ukraine, taking out several dozen journalists in the conflict zone will reduce the quality of the picture presented in the Russian media and, therefore, reduce the effectiveness of their propaganda.”

    The murder of Kalashnykov, Buzyna and their political associates emerges directly from the foul political atmosphere produced by such rantings. It is an indictment of the NATO powers backing the regime in Ukraine, and of illusions peddled by the Western media and corrupt pseudo-left groups that the right-wing protests on the Maidan and the February 2014 putsch were a revolution bringing a flowering of democracy to Ukraine.
    While these forces insisted, without any proof, that the murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was a crime carried out by the Russian government, they are maintaining a hypocritical silence as the Kiev regime’s internal opponents are gunned down in the streets.

Any message or comments?

pre-moderation

This forum is moderated before publication: your contribution will only appear after being validated by an administrator.

Who are you?
Your post

To create paragraphs, just leave blank lines.