The activities of the Ukrainian far-rights are hard to miss. In recent years, among the targets of their violence were various groups of people: journalists, participants of peaceful gatherings on specific topics, such as anti-fascist, feminist & LGBT+ gatherings, participants of social protest-, opposition- and election-themed meetings. They also targeted some citizens with “wrong”, as to rightwing radicals, views. Police, meanwhile, has not been acting upon these cases, and is sometimes even benevolent to violators.
INTRODUCTION
The activities of the Ukrainian far-rights are hard to miss. In recent years, among the targets of their violence were various groups of people: journalists, participants of peaceful gatherings on specific topics, such as anti-fascist, feminist & LGBT+ gatherings, participants of social protest-, opposition- and election-themed meetings. They also targeted some citizens with “wrong”, as to rightwing radicals, views. Police, meanwhile, has not been acting upon these cases, and is sometimes even benevolent to violators.
Nevertheless, the Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov was able to stay in his chair during the change of government in Ukraine. Moreover, during his term, a partial integration of some radical
right-wing groups into the country’s security agencies has been happening, as well as active cooperation between these groups and the Ministry of Interior. In particular, Avakov is associated with the activities of the National Retinues (Natsional’ni druzhyny). The minister himself accused the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) of allying with C14, another far-right group.
On the one hand, it appears that the new Ukrainian authorities are trying to come to an agreement with the radicals — the president Zelensky’s meeting with veterans, which was also attended by the C14 and Azov leaders, is quite illustrative of that. On the other hand, it seems that the authorities do not understand very well the ‘features’ of the community they are trying to negotiate with. One may recall the incident with Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk paying a visit to a veteran get-together, wherethe neo-Nazi band Sokyra Peruna performed music.
It is important to keep in mind that the street activities of far-right groups and organizations, which often take on forms of violence or confrontation, form the background of these events, as was the case during the previous government.
With the support of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in Ukraine, since October 14, 2018 the Institut Respublika NGO has been collecting and structuring data on street violence and confrontation committed by far-right oriented groups, parties, organizations and citizens. The database is created on the basis of daily monitoring of news published on national, regional and activist websites and social networks. This data allowed to assess the magnitude of the problem, track current trends, point out the most prominent far-right actors, and figure out which groups of people most often appear to be victims of ultra-right street violence.
The collected data also underlines the fact that the civil society does not form, with few exceptions, any demands to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to investigate far-right violence. For example, on September 27, 2019, an activist action Who is the following Handziuk? was held. The participants demanded to find and punish the perpetrators of the attacks on the activists. Gazeta.ua’s article of September 28, 2019 states that during the similar action last year activists made a list of cases that they demanded to be investigated. However, there were no cases featuring attacks by far-rights on LGBT+, left or feminist activists listed (...)
