Ukraine’s Unfinished Revolution
KYIV – For Ukraine’s far-right groups, the revolution is unfinished. Their
politicians and paramilitary movements are continuing the hunt for enemies and
traitors. Nationalists from the Freedom Party,
the Right Sector militia, and splinter groups such as the ultranationalist White
Hammer, are demanding what they call “total lustration,” or cleansing, of the political
and business elites. As they see it, the revolution won’t be complete until
this demand is satisfied. The interim Ukrainian government, which draws primarily
on the Fatherland Party and moderate members of Freedom, doesn’t necessarily
share this view. As they see it, the revolution culminated in February, when President
Viktor Yanukovych abandoned the country and fled to Moscow. Now, they say, it’s
time for elections, not more protests and unrest.
New
political scandals envelop the capital with each passing day. Last week a
nationalist leader named Alexander Muzychko was shot
dead by police attempting to arrest him. His death provoked another
anti-government rally: hundreds of angry activists carrying the black and red
flags of the World War II-era Ukrainian
Insurgent Army gathered
on Thursday night outside the parliament, chanting and setting tires on fire. The
ultranationalists threatened to take revenge on the interior minister, Arsen
Avakov, unless he ordered the arrest of all those participating in the
operation against Muzychko. Activists in the crowd issued calls for a “second
Maidan” (a reference to the central square in Kyiv where the February
revolution had its focus).
Avakov
said that he wouldn’t back down from fighting those he now called “bandits.” At
a Friday meeting with law enforcement commanders and parliamentary deputies, the
interior minister suggested banning Right Sector as a radical organization.
Last month, the interior ministry and the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency,
issued a joint demand to all of the Maidan activists to hand in illegal weapons,
citing “a situation of emergency in the country.” But Dmytro Yarosh, the leader
of Right Sector, has resisted disarming his paramilitary army, though he’s also
said that he will obey the law. Yarosh has now declared
himself to be a candidate for president in the general election scheduled
for May 25. His candidacy won’t be official, though: Though he insists that he
filed the proper documents, his name wasn’t included in the list of registered candidates.
It’s not entirely clear why.
In
an interview earlier this month, before the weapon ban took effect, Yarosh told
me that he needed his allegedly 10,000-strong force not to help Ukraine
join the EU — that was never his goal, he emphasized — but in order to fight
Russia and realize his plans for a “nationalist revolution” at home. The
nationalist leader said that he’d been consistent in his ideology for the past
25 years: anybody in favor of the Russian empire was his enemy. Many other
Ukrainians take issue with that approach. Aleksey Verna, a supporter of the
ex-boxer-turned-opposition-leader Vitali Klitschko, put it this way: “Instead
of helping us to build a new, European-style system of governance, the Right
Sector gave a wonderful present to the propagandists in the Kremlin: a perfect
reason to criticize the Maidan.”
The
bad news from Right Sector has grown as fast as the rising dough in a
traditional Ukrainian pie. Many recruits signed up after Yanukovych fled, when
most people thought the revolution was over. On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow suspects
Right Sector of organizing the sniper shootings in Kyiv that resulted in the
deaths of Maidan activists in February. (Most of the revolutionaries and their
western supporters believe, by contrast, that the Yanukovych government was
behind the shootings.)
On
the same day, the independent newspaper Ukrainska Pravda published a report citing
Right Sector activists who described how they’ve been using armored vehicles
taken from a presidential garage, an admission marring what had been the street
fighters’ good record of refraining from expropriations and looting. The
movement’s activists said they could not imagine purchasing vehicles “during
the revolutionary period.” To them, apparently, it seemed obvious that the
revolution has to go on. On Monday night, Right Sector activists shot
and wounded three men on the Maidan. The next morning police evicted Right Sector
from their headquarters in the Dnipro Hotel, where for almost a month their
rough-looking activists armed with Kalashnikovs had terrified the hotel’s
visitors. (The photo above shows members of the militia leaving the hotel.)
Only
recently have supporters and participants of the Maidan rallies begun to ask
each other about the background of Right Sector and its leaders: By what right
do they claim the leading role in the revolution? Until last December nobody in
Ukraine had heard of the organization. In February and March I spoke with
several Right Sector activists in the buildings they had seized in downtown
Kyiv. Some of them were veterans of post-Soviet crises, including the First
Chechen War and the conflict in Abkhazia, where they fought against the Russian
military. Yet they don’t seem to be entirely anti-Russian in their sentiment. During
the war over Moldova’s breakaway Transdnistria region, some of Right Sector’s
recruiters are said to have fought on the side of the Russians.
Muzychko
was one of those recruiters. He fought with Chechen guerillas against Russian
army under the nickname Sashko Bilyi; upon his return to Ukraine he spent
several years in jail for extortion. Russia accused Muzychko of atrocities in
Chechnya, while at home he was charged with leading a criminal gang. In the
midst of the Maidan revolution Muzychko emerged as one of Right Sector’s
leaders. On February 27, when Kyiv was still mourning 102 victims of the violent
conflict with police, Muzychko violently confronted a provincial
prosecutor in an appalling scene that was captured on video.
Facebook
exploded with allegations about Right Sector destabilizing the already
vulnerable situation in Ukraine, leading some to accuse the group of working in
favor of the Russian secret services. A prominent local journalist, Mustafa
Nayyem, who was one of the organizers of the pro-European protests on the
Maidan, criticized the radicals on his blog: “We came out to the Maidan to
oppose the bullies in power. To me, the symbols of those bullies’ rule are
those who continue to humiliate, insult, and oppress us, pretending that they
are our masters, exploiting their mandates, and threatening us with weapons and
talk of revenge from mythical quarters.”
Right
Sector activists are not the only ones, however, to disappoint those who still
believe in the values of the “Revolution of Dignity” (as some refer to the
Maidan uprising). Another presidential candidate, ex-Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko, told a friend in a phone call that the 8 million Russians in
Ukraine “should be destroyed with nuclear weapons.” Their phone conversation
took place on March 18, when Tymoshenko was having medical treatment in
Germany. The audio of the call, apparently intercepted by Ukrainian or Russian
secret services, was leaked
last week.
The
most popular politician in Ukraine is still Petro Poroshenko, whose reputation
remains unspoiled. Poroshenko, currently the front-runner in the race for
president, was the only Ukrainian billionaire seen on the front lines of the
revolution. In a recent interview
in his office, he told me that “it’s never been my way to hide.” Among the
challenges Ukraine’s new leader will face upon assuming office: how to prevent
the country from falling apart, how to prevent criminal elements from exacerbating
instability, and how to bring the revolution to a full and successful
conclusion.
INNA SOKOLOVSKAYA/AFP/Getty Images