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

Commenting on the event, the Communist Party officials said Stalin was the leader who united modern Ukraine and liberated the world from fascist forces.

The head of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Volhynia called on the communists “to rise in defense of the homeland from fascism” as Ukraine is facing a “neo-Nazi uprising.”

Three years ago, Ukrainian nationalists blew up a monument to Stalin in the Zaporizhia region on the territory of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, a number of statues of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir
Lenin across the country have been vandalized since early December.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych could call early elections if he cannot strike a deal with the opposition, a top lawmaker said on Tuesday ahead of a parliament session where protest leaders will press for concessions.

Yuriy Miroshnychenko, Yanukovych's personal representative in parliament, said the president has spoken at a meeting with lawmakers last week of "two possible scenarios" to end a two-month crisis.

"The first is the release of occupied buildings and an amnesty and the second is early elections. The amnesty is not working out," Miroshnychenko told AFP, referring to the release of detained protesters.

Bulba was terribly headstrong. He was one of those characters which could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century, and in that half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern Russia, deserted by its princes, was laid waste and burned to the quick by pitiless troops of Mongolian robbers; when men deprived of house and home grew brave there; when, amid conflagrations, threatening neighbours, and eternal terrors, they settled down, and growing accustomed to looking these things straight in the face, trained themselves not to know that there was such a thing as fear in the world; when the old, peacable Slav spirit was fired with warlike flame, and the Cossack state was instituted — a free, wild outbreak of Russian nature — and when all the river-banks, fords, and like suitable places were peopled by Cossacks, whose number no man knew. Their bold comrades had a right to reply to the Sultan when he asked how many they were, “Who knows? We are scattered all over the steppes; wherever there is a hillock, there is a Cossack.”

Lithuania on Tuesday confirmed signs of torture on a prominent Ukrainian anti-government activist and urged an independent probe into the crime which could breach a related United Nations convention.

"Dmytro Bulatov...has clear signs of long term torture and cruel treatment on his body," a Lithuanian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Bulatov, who alleges he was "crucified" and tortured for days by unknown assailants in his homeland, is one of three injured Ukrainian protesters receiving free medical care in Lithuania.

In his interview with TIME, Yarosh, whose militant brand of nationalism rejects all foreign influence over Ukrainian affairs, revealed for the first time that Pravy Sektor has amassed a lethal arsenal of weapons. He declined to say exactly how many guns they have. “It is enough,” he says, “to defend all of Ukraine from the internal occupiers” — by which he means the ruling government — and to carry on the revolution if negotiations with that government break down.---

But neither can Klitschko and his fellow politicians easily sever their ties with Pravy Sektor. The group serves some of the uprising’s most essential functions. Its fighters control the barricades around the protest camp in the center of Ukraine’s capital, and when riot police have tried to tear it down, they have been on the front lines beating them back with clubs, rocks, Molotov cocktails and even a few catapults, in the mold of siege engines of the Middle Ages. Around the country, its fighters have helped seize government headquarters in more than a dozen cities. “Pravy Sektor has proved its loyalty to the ideals of freedom,” Yarosh says. “Now we needed to present this movement as a source of leadership.”---

Through all his years in the nationalist movement, Yarosh, a 42-year-old father of three, says he has never had any form of occupation apart from his activism. The son of two factory workers, he was born and raised in a provincial town in eastern Ukraine, and became involved in the nationalist underground in the late 1980s, just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Nearly all of the satellite states of the USSR, from the Baltics to Central Asia, were then pushing to break away from Moscow’s control, and in 1988, Yarosh joined one of the more radical groups fighting for an independent Ukraine.

The following autumn, months after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, Yarosh was drafted into the Red Army, a common form of punishment for political activists at the time. He was stationed briefly in Belarus before being transferred to Siberia, where he served as a guard at strategic missile sites. The Soviet doctrines of unity between Russia and Ukraine did little to soften his views. “If anything, the army made me more convinced that my path is correct,” he says. When Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Yarosh went on hunger strike to demand a transfer to the newly established Ukrainian army. His commanding officers ignored him.

In 1994, a few years after he was discharged and returned to Ukraine, he joined a right-wing organization called Trizub (Trident), and slowly climbed its ranks before assuming leadership in 2005. Along with several other far-right groups, Trizub formed the core of Pravy Sektor when the current uprising broke out in Ukraine two months ago. Its main adversary has always been Russia, although it also has little patience for Western influence on Ukraine. “For all the years of Ukraine’s independence, Russia has pursued a systematic, targeted policy of subjugation toward Ukraine,” Yarosh says. “So of course we will prepare for a conflict with them,” he adds, especially after Russia’s recent invasion of another one of its former satellites, Georgia. “If they stick their faces here like they did in Georgia in 2008, they’ll get it in the teeth.”

The mayor of a western city warned that his police would fight any troops sent in by the president. The governor of an eastern region posted an image of an opposition lawmaker beaten bloody, saying he couldn’t contain his laughter.

Two months into Ukraine’s anti-government protests, the two sides are only moving further apart.---

The country now stands split nearly down the middle. According to a December poll by the Razumkov Center think tank, 50 percent of Ukrainians supported the protests while 43 percent opposed them. The poll, which interviewed 2,010 people across Ukraine in person, had a margin of error of 2.3 percentage points.

And as the country has polarized, Razumkov found, both Yanukovych and the main opposition leaders have risen in popularity, while the number of people who support neither side has fallen. Support for Yanukovych rose from 19 percent in October to 29 percent in December, while opposition leader Vitali Klitschko rose from 16 percent to 22 percent and Arseniy Yatsenyuk from 6 percent to 12 percent.

The sides now appear to be at a stalemate.

The United States and Europe may finally be ready to put some real emergency aid on the table as part of an effort to resolve the political crisis in Ukraine and to tie the country more closely to the West. Without such an offer of financial support, Russia will continue to have leverage to bully Ukraine into its geopolitical orbit.---

The Western package is mainly intended as bridge financing to get a new Ukrainian government, if one is formed, through a transition period so it can make the sufficient reforms needed to qualify for a long-delayed loan from the International Monetary Fund. The West is looking for a government of experts, possibly led by an opposition leader.

There is undoubtedly risk because it is not at all clear that Mr. Yanukovych and the opposition can find any basis for real compromise, or, if they do, make it work over the long term. But the West needs to be even more committed than Russia in offering Ukraine a compelling path forward. And it needs to move quickly. Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told The Wall Street Journal over the weekend that the package could include not just money but loan guarantees, investment and currency stabilization.

As violence flared late last month in Kiev after Parliament approved a draconian law against dissent, two of the richest men in this industrial city 300 miles to the east of the Ukrainian capital met in an expensive Italian restaurant that they own and made a fateful decision.

The men, Hennadiy Korban and his partner Borys Filatov, decided to remove advertising videos featuring glamorous models from a large outdoor screen at an upscale shopping mall called Passage and replace them with a live broadcast of raucous antigovernment protests at Independence Square in Kiev.

They also ordered their local properties to hoist the flags of the European Union and Ukraine, a gesture of open revolt in a Russian-speaking region where economic and political power have traditionally been united in looking more to Moscow than to Europe for guidance.

Retribution, or at least some extraordinarily bad luck, swiftly followed. Hours after the flags went up on Jan. 25, all three of their company’s shopping malls in Dnepropetrovsk lost their electricity, and panicked shoppers scrambled through the dark for the exits.---

The defection of two provincial businessmen — motivated as much by resentment of the strong-arm tactics of rivals in league with the government as by lofty ideals — will not tip the balance of power in Kiev or even here in this city of more than a million people, its economy dominated by huge Soviet-era factories like Yuzhmash, a rocket maker still owned by the state.

But it underscores how a protest movement that the government dismisses as the work of nationalist extremists from the country’s west has reached into Mr. Yanukovych’s political power base in the east and is even eroding the loyalties of those who have thrived under him.

And it shows how, for all their differences, the disaffected moguls and the protesters are driven by a deep frustration with what they see as the country’s lawless law-enforcement system and ubiquitous corruption. Both camps call for not just democracy but for a more “normal,” European-style government with transparent institutions, secure property rights and an impartial justice system.

Fearing arrest, Mr. Korban and Mr. Filatov fled Ukraine for Israel last week. A Dnepropetrovsk judge ordered on Jan. 29 that Mr. Korban be detained and interrogated as a witness in connection with a previously dormant investigation of a 2012 murder.