Less than 1 month remains to the 2019 Ukrainian presidential elections and the game of hot potato vis-a-vis the neo-Nazi radical groups continues to intensify and become all the more risky for the parties involved. Poroshenko absolutely needs their services in order to intimidate eligible voters and disrupt the campaigning of the only other candidates who actually stand a chance of winning – Tymoshenko and Zelensky, but at the same time he can’t afford to link himself to them too easily.
Tymoshenko needs them because she simply can’t become president without a degree of their support, but she can’t be seen to be too close to them for the same reasons Petro can’t. The Interior Minster Arsen Avakov acts as the regulator of the situation, controlling the tap of nationalist aggression via law enforcement bodies, thus negotiating with the candidates over his future. And the SBU and the Prosecutor-General Yury Lutsenko have long shown their loyalty towards Poroshenko, especially since the former is involved in the same corruption schemes as Bankova Street, and the latter is the Godfather of Poroshenko’s children.
The incident in February involving the police and thugs from both “C14“ and “National Corpus“ served as a good reference point in understanding the current dynamic in Kiev. And it turns out that this spectacle has received a follow-up. Avakov, in an interview with the “babel” website on March 1st, accused the SBU of cooperating with the “C14”. Now of course, here he is actually stating an open secret that the Banderist thugs themselves have admitted in the past. But the timing of such a statement is certainly not a coincidence. He said:
“The chairman of the SBU (Vasily) Gritsak is an honest officer, he has done a lot for Ukraine. But in some cases we have documented obscure processes in the SBU. What do I mean? We unexpectedly recorded cooperation between the Security Service and ultra-right radicals from ‘C14’, under the cover of correct slogans with the demand to investigate the case of Gandzyuk (the adviser to the mayor of Kherson Ekaterina Gandzyuk, who was killed in July 2018) and in a certain grouping with employees of the SBU, ‘C14’ carried out very unseemly affairs,” said Avakov.
He added that this concerns the meeting on February 18th outside the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where “C14 demanded” the resignation of the head of the department:
We documented the cars of SBU employees, which delivered visual propaganda for these ‘protesting patriots’. I do not exclude, however, that this was the private initiative of certain employees of the SBU
Now for those who are unaware, the “case of Gandzyuk” is being used by Washington as a way of influencing the leading candidates of the presidential race under the guise of “combatting corruption”. A former member of Tymoshenko’s party has already been arrested in connection with the case, which can be seen as an attack on her, and before this the “protestors” have also linked Poroshenko with the murder of Gandzyuk. And in this regard both Petro and Yuliya try to bat this NGO technology away towards their respective rival, with the arrest of Tymoshenko’s former party member being the counterattack of Poroshenko/Lutsenko.
So, knowing that Avakov is in negotiations with Tymoshenko over guarantees of him keeping his job as Interior Minister should she win, it is no surprise here that Avakov is defending Tymoshenko and linking “C14” with Poroshenko’s environment, whilst at the same time hinting that Poroshenko’s radicals are hijacking the Gandzyuk topic and using it like a trojan horse as a way of legitimising their violations of the electoral law and constitution.
In other words, the raising of, and flirting with, Banderist formations during the post-Maidan period is not something that can be easily concealed. The sad fact is that it is terrorist groups like “C14” and “National Corpus” that dictate both the internal and external state policies of Ukraine, and any talk about “stopping titushki” voiced by the US State Department is simply deliberate deception, juggling the hot potato in a desperate attempt to convince lay Ukrainians that Russia is indeed to blame for the now comatose social-economic situation. And this is indeed the playbook wherever America injects in venom in the form of “freedom fighters” installing “democracy” one pogrom at a time.
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