Militias don’t trust Kyiv against Kremlin – Regina Leader
Maj. Viktor Kulyk, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s newly created national guard, is proud to help his country in its hour of need.
At its Kyiv headquarters, guards stand on duty in regular military fatigues, while in an operations room inside, a map on the wall shows their units from Lviv in the west through to Donetsk in the east.
Already, they number at least 3,000 men – ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice, he says, in the event of the feared Russian invasion.
There is, however, just one problem: While Ukraine’s new government has started up a new reservist force to defend the country following the Crimea debacle, Kulyk’s men are not part of it.
They form an entirely separate organization that wants nothing to do with the government – one of a growing number of private armies that have sprang up since the revolution that ousted former president Viktor Yanukovych last month. Formed during the street fighting that led to his fall, they include Pravy Sektor, the nationalist group whose far-right leanings have helped Moscow to portray the revolution as a fascist-led coup.
But while Kyiv’s new, pro-European leaders are under pressure from the West to rein them in, men such as Kulyk are in no mood to take orders from a government they already distrust for losing Crimea. “The ministry of interior has asked us to disband, but we are not willing to,” he said. “It is like asking a man to become a woman, as it is normal that any man wants to protect his homeland.
“The government gave up Crimea without a shot, and now it is facing further trouble in the east of our country and not doing anything about it.”
Known originally as “hundreds” because each unit was made up of 100 volunteers, the militias started as self-defence units to protect the crowds from Yanukovych’s feared security police.