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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/13/ukraine-far-right-fascism-mps

Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger

The indifference of officials and mainstream opinion to the election of far-right MPs is hugely worrying

Volodymyr Ishchenko 13.11.2014

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Despite the failures of far-right parties, 13 far-right MPs have been elected to parliament in the single-member districts or in the lists of formally “non-far-right” parties, including the Radical party of political clown Oleg Lyashko and even the pro-presidential Petro Poroshenko Bloc.

Moreover, some of the new MPs are not just far right but actual neo-Nazis. Take Andriy Biletsky, elected in a single-member district in Kiev with support from the People’s Front party led by Arseniy Yatseniuk. Biletsky was the head of an openly racist Patriot of Ukraine group which was involved in hate crimes against minorities, and later formed the core of the infamous Azov volunteer battalion, which uses neo-Nazi symbolism. He was celebrated as commander of the Azov battalion and assigned to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the police.

Biletsky is not the only neo-Nazi recently appointed to law enforcement bodies. In October, Vadym Troyan, another Patriot of Ukraine member and deputy commander of the Azov battalion, was appointed as the head of the police in Kiev Oblast province. A Kharkov human rights group called it a “disastrous appointment”. At the same time, another infamous extreme right politician from the Svoboda party Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn, who once promoted Joseph Goebbels’ A Little ABC of National Socialism and the 25-point NSDAP Program, will head up propaganda and analysis in the Security Service of Ukraine. Allowing people with such extreme views control over positions with significant enforcement resources is an obvious danger to democracy.

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Even in critical discussions around the far-right appointments to high positions within law enforcement, there seem to be more worries about Ukraine’s international image than what neo-Nazis can do against political opponents and minorities and the dangerous resources they might accumulate. Ukrainians have already paid a very high price for ignoring the far right. According to research into systematic protests, members of the far right were the most visibly identified political agents in the Maidan protests, from the very beginning of the movement to the overthrow of Yanukovych.

Moreover, they were relatively more visible in eastern and southern regions where Maidan did not have the majority support, thus pushing the local population even further away from the protest message. This was not a Russian media invention. On the contrary, it happened as a result of the preceding protest coalition of the centrist opposition parties with Svoboda. High far-right visibility was one of the factors which prevented Maidan from growing into a truly national movement against Yanukovych, and formed the ground for the civil war.

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Elke Schenk

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