Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

Two months ago, few people in Ukraine had ever heard of Common Cause. In the vibrant patchwork of activists that make up the country’s civil society, they were a minor presence, best known for picketing against corruption, monitoring elections and rallying for human-rights and democratic change.---

But the government’s attempts to clear the streets over the past two weeks have marked a dark turn for this uprising. Several protesters have been killed in clashes with police, and the revolt has become increasingly violent, erratic and unpredictable. The radicalization of Common Cause is so far the starkest example in this shift.---

Not long before midnight on Sunday, a few dozen men in ski masks and camouflage surrounded the headquarters of the Ministry of Justice in the center of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and smashed out the first floor windows with baseball bats. They made short work of the bars over the windows, prying them out of the walls with their clubs, and climbed inside. It was the third federal ministry the group had seized in a week.

Activists from a radical Ukrainian protest group today vacated the agriculture ministry they had occupied for five days after clashes with other opposition protesters who demanded that they leave.

The Spilna Sprava (Common Cause) activists walked out of the agriculture ministry building after representatives of the more mainstream opposition urged them to leave it so as not to impede negotiations with the authorities about an amnesty, an AFP correspondent said.

The group of several dozen Spilna Sprava activists were dressed in camouflage gear with their faces concealed behind balaclavas. Some carried shields, the reporter said.

They moved out after dozens of protesters representing the right-wing nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, which is in negotiations with the government, arrived at the building to push them out.

Ukraine’s Channel Five television reported that there had been an “internecine” clash at the ministry after it was stormed by the Svoboda activists.

It said that several people were injured after non-lethal weapons were used.

According to Danylyuk, Spilna Sprava co-ordinates activity with Pravy Sektor and chiefs of “self-defence” groups in the camp on Independence Square. He says few, if any, are allied to mainstream parties, which he says “never used their chances to stop this dictatorship”.
“Politicians monopolised the platform on Independence Square and did nothing during two months of protests,” he told The Irish Times.

“They must also take responsibility for the victims on Grushevsky Street. Because for two months they let people just stand there, waiting like lambs for the slaughter.
“They didn’t act like rebels. I’m not even sure they had a strategy,” Danylyuk said.

He describes Spilna Sprava as a “pro-democracy civil movement” which was founded during 2010 rallies to fight new tax laws that hurt small businesses. Those protests were crushed. Now, claims Danylyuk, Spilna Sprava and protesters in most of Ukraine’s main cities are fighting a joint effort by Yanukovich and his Russian backers to “organise a dictatorship in Ukraine and break its independence”.
“This isn’t, as the West thinks, some kind of controlled chaos. This is already a real war for Ukrainian independence. And millions of people with no connection to the official opposition are ready to die for it.”


Danylyuk hopes occupying ministries will expose the president’s weakness and force him to call immediate elections, so preventing possible bloodshed.
Many people are alarmed by the far-right stance of some of Danylyuk’s allies in Pravy Sektor, but he insists they are “nationalists, not Nazis”.
“And they are not all the guys on Grushevsky Street. At least 70 per cent of people there are ordinary Ukrainians who just want to stop the terror of this regime,”he said.

It's that historic faultline at the heart of Ukraine that the west has been trying to exploit to roll back Russian influence since the 1990s, including a concerted attempt to draw Ukraine into Nato. The Orange revolution leaders were encouraged to send Ukrainian troops into Iraq and Afghanistan as a sweetener.

Nato's eastward expansion was halted by the Georgian war of 2008 and Yanukovych's later election on a platform of non-alignment. But any doubt that the EU's effort to woo Ukraine is closely connected with western military strategy was dispelled today by Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who declared that the abortive pact with Ukraine would have been "a major boost to Euro-Atlantic security".

Which helps to explain why politicians like John Kerry and William Hague have been so fierce in their condemnation of Ukrainian police violence – which has already left several dead – while maintaining such studied restraint over the killing of thousands of protesters in Egypt since last year's coup.

Not that Yanukovych could be mistaken for any kind of progressive. He has been backed to the hilt by billionaire oligarchs who seized control of resources and privatised companies after the collapse of the Soviet Union – and fund opposition politicians and protesters at the same time. Indeed, one interpretation of the Ukrainian president's problems is that the established oligarchs have had enough of favours granted to an upstart group known as "the family".

It's anger at this grotesque corruption and inequality, Ukraine's economic stagnation and poverty that has brought many ordinary Ukrainians to join the protests – as well as outrage at police brutality. Like Russia, Ukraine was beggared by the neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatisation of the post-Soviet years. More than half the country's national income was lost in five years and it has yet fully to recover.

But nor do the main opposition and protest leaders offer any kind of genuine alternative, let alone a challenge to the oligarchy that has Ukraine in its grip.

The Ukrainian parliament has passed a law providing amnesty to protesters detained during recent unrest.

The amnesty will only apply once other protesters leave government buildings they have occupied in recent days.

The measure, intended to ease unrest on the streets, was adopted after a day of intense debate.

Late on Wednesday, the amnesty bill was backed by President Viktor Yanukovych's majority Party of the Regions, but opposition MPs abstained from voting, Ukrainian media report, as they objected to the conditions it imposed.

But if a new Ukrainian government spurns Putin and signs an “association agreement” with the European Union, as also seems probable, Putin’s promise yesterday to maintain Moscow’s super-friendly terms—5% interest on $12 billion in additional bailout money, and a 33% discount on natural gas purchases from Gazprom—might prove empty. “Russia’s debt support is conditional on a pro-Russia government, and if Yanukovych is ousted, the debt support may cease,” Macro-Advisory’s Chris Weafer said today in a note to clients.
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And even if Putin were willing to maintain the lifeline, the new government itself “could say, ‘We don’t want the bailout,’” said Jeff Mankoff of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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But the question will then be whether Europe and the International Monetary Fund are prepared themselves to rescue Ukraine.
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The sums are not trifling. Ukraine will require about $24 billion to cover a budget deficit, debt repayments, natural gas bills and pension support just in 2014, Moody’s said in a Dec. 27 note to clients. In coming years, much more debt will come due, including $2 billion already received from Russia and possibly $3 billion more to come Jan. 31. In total, Ukraine’s current debt is about $137 billion. Mankoff told Quartz that Europe is conflicted—Poland and some other Eastern European states are pushing for Ukraine to be integrated into the EU, while other members are ambivalent.
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And even if Europe is willing in principle, Ukraine may not be able to meet its terms. Yanukovych went to Moscow in the first place because its bailout terms were so much easier than Europe’s. “A new opposition-backed president is unlikely to have any more of an appetite for the EU/IMF austerity package offered last year than the present incumbent has,” wrote Weafer.
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Europe and Russia derive mutual glee from poking each other in the eye. But in this case, whoever “wins” Ukraine will arguably be the one that gets the poke.

Despite the subdued mood, Wednesday was a big day for Ukrainian nationalists, who celebrated the anniversary of the 1918 Kruty Battle, when a small Ukrainian unit made up mostly of students fought against a force of Bolsheviks 10 times bigger marching on Kiev.
The students were defeated, but the true story was kept under wraps for years by the Soviet Union. And many nationalists liken the students' stand to that of the Spartans – dying for the sake of the motherland.

So, Wednesday was not a day to be missed by the country's nationalist groups, which have been playing an increasingly dominant role since the protests turned violent. They emerged in the morning as if from hibernation from a sea of tents and shelters in surrounding buildings to prepare for a two-mile march to a local Kruty Battle memorial.

In the vanguard of a 2,000-strong march were groups of militia-type tough guys, many in combat fatigues and carrying sticks, baseball bats and shields. Some wore ice-hockey body armor. Most wore helmets. They were marshaled, military-style, by burly men in camouflage uniforms and balaclavas.
"Glory to Ukraine, glory to heroes," they shouted as they marched. Then: "Glory to the nation! Death to the enemies!" -- slogans from the nationalist movement of the 1930s, more recently espoused by the Ukrainian far right.

Kruty, Battle of [Бій під Крутами; Bij pid Krutamy]. A battle near Kruty, Nizhyn county, Chernihiv gubernia on 29 January 1918. As a Bolshevik force of about 4,000 men commanded by Mikhail Muravev advanced toward Kyiv, a small contingent of 500 men was hastily organized and sent to the front. It consisted mainly of a company of the Student Kurin of Sich Riflemen (see Student Battalion), a company of the Khmelnytsky Cadet School, and a Haidamaka detachment (see Haidamaka Units of the Army of the UNR). Commanded by Capt Ahapii Honcharenko, this force attempted to block the Bolshevik advance on the capital at Kruty, a railroad station 130 km northeast of Kyiv. In a bitter battle about half of the Ukrainian soldiers were killed, but their resistance delayed Muravev's capture of Kyiv and enabled the Ukrainian government to conclude the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The battle is commemorated as a symbol of patriotic self-sacrifice and is immortalized in numerous literary and publicistic works.

Mikheyev noted that Klitschko began to turn into a political figure 18 months ago. "This happened partially because he has taken root in Europe. He is not an independent figure, he was advised and persuaded. This is a tried Western method when show business personalities (and boxing has long become show business) are turned into politicians usually at the end of their professional career. Plus, Klitschko was not smeared in past scandals. It also helped that everyone is fed up with other politicians, including Yulia Tymoshenko. They searched for and found a new person, but not every cook can run the state," said Mikheyev. However, in his opinion, Klitschko will not do it, and regents and behind-the-scenes puppeteers would do it for him, he will be there only for the sake of appearance. If we imagine that the leader of Udar becomes president, the "person with a German passport will be a blow to the Ukrainian statehood." "If I were Klitschko I would give up my German passport. To have a German passport and run for the title of the head of Ukraine is a particular form of cynicism," said the expert.

Do the voters understand it? The expert has doubts. The bulk of the population, about 90 percent, generally does not understand real conflicts of the political process. "They are nothing more than human mass for brainwashing."

Mikheyev does not believe that the opposition would nominate a single candidate for the presidential elections. He thinks the plan has likely generated in the depths of the Party of Regions. Tyagnibok will be unleashed, brought in as the main rival of Yanukovych, and then everyone scared of neo-Nazis and Bandera would elect Yanukovych. The expert considers the idea adventurous and dangerous, because Tyahnibok is already out of control. "Europe has already put him on a par with liberal politicians, he hung out with Western politicians and became quite a legitimate character. This is a very unpleasant thing because a neo-Nazi hero has become acceptable, and neo-Nazism has become an organic part of the opposition movement," said Mikheyev. "Despite the dubiousness of this plan, it is achievable. Klitschko will not be able to run, Tymoshenko is in jail, Yatsenyuk does not fit because he is a secondary figure who represents the interests of Tymoshenko. Tyahnibok is the only one left."

The opposition did not vote for the amnesty bill as they are unhappy that the law is conditional on protestors vacating buildings they are occupying in Kiev before it takes effect.

Svoboda (Freedom) party leader Oleg Tyagnybok said that parliament had essentially adopted a law about "hostages" as the dozens arrested during the crisis would now be held until buildings are freed.

"The authorities have now admitted they take hostages like terrorists do, so that they can then barter over them", he was quoted as saying by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

The UDAR (Punch) party leader and world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko warned: "Instead of lowering the temperature in society this is going to raise it".

Dozens of activists have been arrested since clashes broke out on 19 January, both in Kiev and in the provinces, where activists have stormed regional administration buildings.

Viktor F. Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, went on sick leave on Thursday, leaving negotiated efforts to resolve the country’s political crisis uncompleted.

A statement on the president’s website said Mr. Yanukovych is taking time off because of a respiratory illness and fever, and offered no indication of how long he was expected to be absent. The statement cited a deputy director of the presidential administration responsible for medical affairs.---

Mr. Yanukovych went on sick leave before signing into law the repeal of harsh new rules against freedom of assembly and freedom of speech that was passed in Parliament with support from the pro-government party on Tuesday in a significant concession to the opposition but means little unless it is signed.

Overnight Wednesday, two protesters were brought to a hospital with gunshot wounds and one died, Aleksei Davidenko, an opposition member of the Kiev City Council, told Ukrainian news websites. The death brings to four the number of protesters shot to death in recent days, all on Hrushevskovo Street, the site of a standoff with police. The Interior Ministry has denied using live ammunition in the clashes.

"We have fulfilled all the obligations which the authorities took on themselves," President Yanukovych said in the statement.

"However, the opposition continues to whip up the situation calling on people to stand in the cold for the sake of the political ambitions of a few leaders. I think this is wrong."

As many as 234 people have been detained during the current protests in Ukraine, and 140 of them have been arrested, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office reported on Jan. 30.

Over the past ten days the barricades have grown higher and have also moved a lot closer to the government’s offices. Fortified by the remains of burned-out police vans and sandbags, they now look less like a decoration and more like the front line in a war. After violent clashes with the police on January 22nd, the atmosphere has become more militant and sombre. The men who guard the new border wear protective helmets and keep a wartime discipline. The slogans by which protesters greet each other—“glory to heroes, death to the enemy”—sound alarmingly serious.

The “enemy” on the other side of the barricades is hundreds of riot police backed by armoured personnel-carriers. In the past two weeks at least five people have been killed in clashes and another 20 have gone missing. The exact number of injured is unknown, because most refuse to go to hospital for fear of being abducted by pro-government thugs.

The bill — which still needs to be signed by Yanukovych — says Ukrainian is the official language but states that minority languages can be used by officials and bodies in regions where the population uses these languages.

This gives a boost to Russian, historically the language of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, and the opposition fears that the law will undermine the use of the Ukrainian language.

“This is not a language issue, this is a splitting of the country,” Klitschko, who heads Kiev-based political party Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform told reporters at the protest.

The crowd chanted the traditionally nationalist slogans like “Glory to Ukraine, glory to heroes,” and “Glory to the nation, death to the enemies,” and held several signs including one that read “For the language, for Motherland.”

The events that have unfolded in Kiev over the past ten days have surprised everyone, including Mr Yanukovych, opposition leaders and the Kremlin in Moscow. The passage of repressive laws, which were copied (and possibly prompted) by the Kremlin, was supposed to give Mr Yanukovych a legal basis for repression. The violent attack on the police and the incineration of their buses on January 22nd, which may have been the work of agents provocateurs, were meant to yield television pictures that could, in the eyes of the world, justify a crackdown. What nobody expected, says Ms Mostovaya, was that this provocation would spark genuine unrest and be backed by thousands of new protesters. Angry at Mr Yanukovych’s laws and fed up with the ineffectiveness of the main opposition leaders, ordinary Ukrainians have moved into the streets.

Suddenly, instead of a crudely planned special operation, Mr Yanukovych is faced with a revolutionary situation. A genuine prospect of civil war has changed the attitude of all involved. Mr Yanukovych has come under intense pressure from the Americans, who have revoked visas for some officials and threatened wide sanctions if the president uses violence—a step which the European Union has conspicuously failed to follow.

He is also facing a revolt among the oligarchs who control the media, as well as parliamentarians who now see Mr Yanukovych as a risk. They have long been aggrieved by the way he has allowed his son and close friends, collectively known as the “family”, to grab power and money in the country, leaving oligarchs with the crumbs on the table. They have exploited the crisis to redress the balance of power. Some have allegedly used their influence and money across Ukraine to facilitate “spontaneous” takeovers of local administrations. With so many police deployed in Kiev, Mr Yanukovych lacks the force with which to fight back.

Right Sector, the most high-profile group, was formed on the Maidan from two-ultra-nationalist groups. One is Trident, which also names itself after Stepan Bandera, who led a guerrilla war against the Nazis and Soviets in the 1940s and 1950s. The other is White Hammer, previously known for attacks on casinos – illegal in Ukraine since 2009.

Its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, 42, from eastern Ukraine, appeared at a press conference this week. Dressed in a black army jumper, he said the main protest leaders’ timidity had forced him to “take responsibility for the revolutionary process”.

Andreas Umland, an academic who studies Ukrainian nationalism, says such groups have no chance of “becoming parliamentary or taking over”, even if the protests succeed in toppling Mr Yanukovich.
Mr Shekhovstov adds that they would almost certainly call off their actions if protest leaders agreed a compromise with Ukraine’s leadership, lacking the resources to continue without support of the Maidan.

That is less certain, however, of Common Cause, which was involved in this week’s clashes in the agriculture ministry. Extremist – but not nationalist – and led by a lawyer and advocate of small business rights, Oleksandr Danylyuk, its well-disciplined members were the first to seize government buildings, starting with Kiev’s city hall on December 1.

The group’s occupation of the agriculture, energy and justice ministries last weekend complicated already tense compromise negotiations with the government.
His supporters reluctantly left the ministries this week and Mr Danylyuk disappeared from sight. But he told the FT by phone that his group would continue its “non-violent resistance”.
After Ukraine’s Orange Revolution 10 years ago was “betrayed”, he added, it was vital this time to take things to the end.
“Politicians betray the people through compromise, by imitating a revolution and not fully carrying it through,” he said. “This is happening again today. Politicians are hijacking this movement, using it for their own personal political gain.”

Bily Molot is a relatively new group, which attracted some publicity by smashing a number of illegal casinos in Kyiv and the regions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to talk with members of the Ukrainian opposition during his trip to Germany, which begins Friday.

U.S. officials said Kerry is expected to meet in Munich with opposition politician Arseny Yatsenyuk and former boxing champion-turned-activist Vitali Klitschko.

Kerry laid the groundwork for the meeting by speaking with opposition leaders by phone on Thursday. He commended them for what a spokeswoman called speaking out against violence and their courageous defense of democracy.

“Why do politicians not call for peace and mutual understanding but kindle the emotions with their reckless and irresponsible statements, thinking more about their ratings than about the life and health of people?

“We must understand there is no future for the state and people if political interests of certain groups are set higher than the existence of Ukraine itself.”

But, adopting a softer tone, he admitted the authorities had made mistakes. “From my side, I will show more understanding for the demands and ambitions of people, taking into account the mistakes that authorities always make,” he said.

The president’s retreat into the temporary political sanctuary of illness came as rumours of discord and discontent within his Party of Regions, the dominant force in Ukrainian politics, run rife.

Some have attributed his surprise appearance in parliament on Wednesday night to his need to quell internal rebellions and force people to tow the line.

Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Polish president who has met the Ukrainian leader many times as part of a European Parliament monitoring mission to Ukraine, said the president was running out of friends. “I think this urgent visit to parliament shows he is afraid that the majority is no longer on his side,” Mr Kwasniewski said.

Mr Bulatov says he was left to die by his captors after being kidnapped, repeatedly beaten and "crucified". He was, he said, hung up by his wrists.

"They crucified me, so there are holes in my hands now," he said.

"Other than that - they cut off my ear, cut up my face. My whole body is a mess. You can see everything. I am alive. Thank God for this."

The activist reportedly said he did not know who had abducted him but his abductors had spoken with Russian accents.


According to the Ukrainian news website Gazeta.ua, doctors found no damage to his internal organs or his skull.

Police in Kiev have confirmed Mr Bulatov was bruised and received a cut to one of his ears, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda reports.

They have opened an investigation and posted guards at the hospital where he is being treated.

According to the paper, they also expressed indignation that Mr Bulatov had not phoned them after his release.

Mr Bulatov is a prominent anti-government activist as one of the leaders of the organisation AutoMaidan, a group that has patrolled streets around Independence Square.

An adviser to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has warned that Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovich, risks losing power unless he suppresses the “insurgency” in the country.
The remarks by Sergei Glaziev could provoke a backlash in Ukraine and fuel tensions between Russia and the EU, which have accused each other of interference in a cold-war type geopolitical stand-off.

Mr Yanukovich “is now in a situation of creeping revolution, and to some extent he functions as the guarantee of the constitution, security and integrity of Ukraine, therefore the president has no choice,” Mr Glaziev said in an interview with the corporate magazine of Russian state gas company, Gazprom, published on the editor’s blog on Friday.
“Either he protects Ukrainian statehood and suppresses the insurgency, which is provoked and financed by external forces, or he risks losing power, and then Ukraine faces growing chaos and internal conflict from which no exit is visible.”

The protesters blame such attacks on “thugs” they believe are working with security forces in a co-ordinated campaign to squelch demonstrations that began two months ago when Mr Yanukovich abruptly dropped a political agreement with the EU to forge closer ties with Russia.
The violence illustrates the dark turn the conflict has taken and also harkens back to painful chapters in Ukraine’s history. In the Soviet era, the KGB routinely arrested, tortured and imprisoned Ukrainian “enemies of the state” in Siberian gulags

Arseny Yatseniuk, one of the main protest leaders, told the FT the current government was “acting like terrorists”.
“They’re taking hostages, putting people participating in peaceful protests in jail, trying now to [use] them” to put pressure on demonstrators to free buildings and streets in the city, he added.
Citing Ukraine’s general prosecutor, Mr Yatseniuk said “more than 300 people are in pre-trial detention . . . but the numbers are really bigger”. He estimated that at least 30 people from Kiev alone were missing.
Pro-Yanukovich MPs and law enforcement agencies counter that riot police have suffered more than 300 injuries, including burns from Molotov cocktails thrown by radical protesters. One police officer in Kiev died from a heart attack. Another was stabbed to death by protesters in the city of Kherson, police said.

“These allegedly peaceful protesters even went so far as to temporarily take two police officers hostage days ago for beatings before releasing them,” said a police spokesperson.
The spokesperson said the police were investigating the alleged abductions of Mr Bulatov, Mr Lutsenko and others, but added that there were some “suspicious nuances” in the cases, suggesting they might have been staged to rally people against the government.