Three young conscripts have died from the grenade attack outside Parliament on Monday, August 31: Ihor Debrin, 24, Oleksandr Kostyna, 20, and Dmytro Slastnikov, 21. Well over 130 people were injured, most of them conscripts.
The protests were over highly divisive amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine, but it is not, as at least one headline claimed, the Constitution that is bloodstained, but those far-right politicians and their supporters who are willing to use violence, including a grenade and firearms, at a crowded demonstration.
There is video footage of the grenade thrower, who has been identified as a member of the far-right Svoboda party, fighting in the party’s Sich volunteer battalion. Between 20 and 30 other people were also arrested and are in custody. As of Monday evening, around 100 Svoboda supporters were picketing the Holosiyivsky District Police Station demanding the release of 20 Svoboda activists. That demonstration was peaceful; however, the rhetoric on Svoboda leader Oleh Tiahnybok’s Facebook page remained extremely aggressive. There is no suggestion of any blame for the tragedy, quite the contrary. Mr. Tiahnybok claims the fact that Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov so swiftly “appointed those to be guilty” indicated that “the provocation was planned by him.”
Having asserted that Mr. Avakov is following the road taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he then goes on to use vocabulary that has become standard for Russian propaganda. He claims, for example, that the government is planning “to create the grounds for the use by the punitive organs of weapons, so that at the final vote of treacherous amendments to the Constitution, nobody will be able to stop them.”
Mr. Tiahnybok chooses to forget one or two crucial points. Whatever we may think of the constitutional amendments, they were voted in at the first reading by a significant majority (albeit with a shift in the division of parties for and against) in a democratically elected Parliament. Trying to beat up parliamentarians is not part of the democratic process, nor is flinging grenades and shooting at the police and young conscripts.
Svoboda did not get enough votes to enter the Verkhovna Rada as a party last October, nor was there any significant level of support for the ultra-nationalist Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector).
Oleksandra Matviychuk, one of the founders of Euromaidan SOS emphatically rejects any attempt to compare the violence on Monday to the gunning down of Maidan activists on February 18-20, 2014, “Enough hiding behind the memory of Nebesna Sotnia” (or the Heavenly Brigade, those killed on Maidan), she says. “People using grenades and weapons in a crowd have as much to do with the slain Maidan activists on Instytutska Street as the KGB Russian Patriarch Kirill has to do with the Christian faith.”
The perpetrators also betrayed those who were demonstrating peacefully, while the death of three young men will surely have a deterrent effect. Now everybody will think twice about whether to go out on protests against decisions by the government.
Prominent journalist Ayder Muzhdabaev, who recently moved to Ukraine from Russia, was blunt in his assessment of the day’s events. He stresses that all those guilty of what he clearly considers to be terrorism must face prosecution. All those public figures who welcome such methods, he says, should face “a total public and political boycott and media boycott, until their repentance and apologies to the relatives of the slain young man. No, in fact, afterwards as well.”
“This is scum, moreover dishonest scum, financed by God knows whom and no better than the terrorists of the DPR and LPR [the so-called ‘Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics’]. Even worse because they strike at the very heart of Ukraine,” Mr. Muzhdabaev underscores.
Nothing has ever been proven, but questions about Svoboda’s sources of support have been raised for many years. The party was clearly viewed as useful by the regime of Viktor Yanukovych, with it getting coverage on state-controlled television when other opposition parties were muffled and vilified.
There will doubtless be suggestions from beyond the Svoboda party itself that Russia was behind the events on Monday. Leaving aside the reasons behind the proposed constitutional amendments, Moscow certainly stands to gain from any violence and division in Ukraine, especially that carried out by the far-right parties it has long demonized, especially since the Euro-Maidan.
Attempts to blame it all on Russia, however, require too much to be glossed over and seem dangerously off-track. There has been plenty of evidence of a more destructive side to the far-right movements in Ukraine, most recently in the events in Mukacheve. The relative unity of purpose seen on the Maidan, as well as the voluntary involvement of many members of far-right organizations in fighting Russia’s undeclared war in the Donbas made many loath to overly condemn such organizations.
There was no enemy to be fought outside the Verkhovna Rada on August 31 – there were Ukrainians, including Ihor Debrin, Oleksandr Kostyna and Dmytro Slastnikov whose lives were cut short.
Miroslav Gai put it very well. It is easy to see who won from that day’s events, he writes: Mr. Putin definitely; the former Party of the Regions; and President Petro Poroshenko, who has shown the people who he’s forced to deal with. Everybody’s seen what would happen if Mr. Tiahnybok, or the leader of the Radical Party Oleh Lyashko came to power.
And who lost? The slain National Guardsmen and those wounded, their parents, children, girlfriends, friends, etc. And, Mr. Gai points out, “The Ukrainian people – after all, that grenade was thrown specifically at them.”