A “day of fury” was proclaimed on Monday by the Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda (Freedom). The fury ended with a grenade being thrown into lines of soldiers guarding the Kiev Parliament building, where it exploded, killing one soldier and injuring more than 100 people.
Andrey Kurkov The last day of summer had started strangely peacefully. The lines of text on our TV screens told of a sharp decrease in Russia-backed separatist military activity, of zero fatalities among Ukrainian soldiers and volunteer forces on the frontline. The most recent international peace negotiations in Minsk had also given rise to unexpected optimism. The separatists had promised a complete ceasefire from September 1 and the beginning of talks on pulling back even light artillery from the line of engagement.
Such promises drew cynical smiles from people aware of the real situation in the battle zone: the heavy artillery so ostentatiously withdrawn by both sides has long been returned to the frontline and put to use. Since the beginning of the conflict not a single night has gone by without some artillery fire. The contradiction is understandable. After all, during any war people dream of peace and want to hope that it is about to arrive.
I now wonder if the unexpected moment of quiet on the frontline was not orchestrated so that this week’s explosion of violence in Kiev would sound out even louder. Earlier, on Monday, Parliament voted for a bill put forward by President Petro Poroshenko that paves the way for changes to the Constitution to enable greater autonomy in the areas held by rebels.
No commentator is prepared to predict the outcome of the final vote on the reforms, especially with militant members of Svoboda ranged outside Parliament. The vote will take place only in three or four months’ time, and much can happen between now and then in Kiev, in the Donbass, in the Kremlin and in Brussels.
But the media has been busy throwing up theories about who has most to benefit from this terrorist attack. Most of the analysis in Ukraine naturally points the finger at the Kremlin. Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the so-called Donetsk people’s republic, and Igor Plotnitzky, leader of the so-called Luhansk people’s republic have often promised to export the war from the Donbass to Kiev. They occasionally travel to Moscow and at home are surrounded by emissaries from the Russian Federation. However, for them to organise an attack in Kiev using Ukrainian nationalists as perpetrators, a large number of whom are fighting against the separatists, would require a degree of sophistication normally associated with the professional special services, in this case the Russian secret service.
Orchestrated by whom? Another version has it that the explosion outside Parliament was orchestrated by the President’s administration or the Ukrainian special services in order to discredit Svoboda and other radical nationalists and to “tighten the screws” on the political life of the country, thus justifying control over opposition forces.
This version hardly stands up to criticism. The demonstration was led by MPs who are members of Svoboda but got into Parliament as independent candidates. In the 2014 elections, Svoboda did not win the five per cent of the votes necessary to enter Parliament. Four months earlier, in the presidential election, the party’s leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, won only a little over one per cent of the vote.
This week he was photographed, together with other Svoboda activists, trying to drag a soldier out of the human chain formed around Parliament into the crowd of protesters. It was a moment very reminiscent of the Maidan days, only that then Svoboda members and their leader were inside Parliament. Since then the party has found itself increasingly marginalised.
However, there were other groups represented in the demonstration, among them two that deserve special attention: Oleg Lyashko’s radical party and Igor Kolomoisky’s Ukrop party. T-shirts with the latter party’s emblem were given out free at the demonstration, and those willing to take part were paid to protest. Mr. Kolomoisky is considered to be an enemy of President Poroshenko since he was sacked from his position as Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Mr. Kolomoisky’s man in Odessa, Igor Palitsa, also lost his job as Governor and was replaced by the former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Immediately after the blast, Mr. Lyashko, who is a radical populist with little in common with the radical nationalists, announced the establishment of a campaign to save the nation. Only three or four hours after the explosion, his party had already registered a bill that would block changes to the Constitution at times when the country is under military attack. Mr. Lyashko came second in the presidential elections, and over the last year his Radical party has gone up in the ratings. It is interesting that articles in the press regularly claim to have evidence that both the Svoboda party and the Radical party have been financed by the same oligarchs, the above mentioned Mr. Kolomoisky, Sergey Levochkin — who was head of the presidential administration under Yanukovich and who fled to Moscow after the Maidan – and Dmitry Firtash, who is now being investigated on corruption charges in Austria.
Still, the violence could have a far more banal explanation. To begin with, volunteers who went off to fight in the Donbass for the sake of maintaining Ukraine’s unity were radicals from militant groups such as the Right Sector, which sprang up during the Maidan. There were also volunteers who had no affiliation to any party who went to fight. When the Ukrainian army took over the main role in the fighting, many of the volunteers returned home, taking weapons with them.
Russian TV focused on the events outside the Ukrainian Parliament to prove to viewers that chaos reigns in Ukraine. The violence is a gift to the Kremlin. Yet to suspect the Russian special service of involvement is naive. It will, of course, milk the situation for all it can get, but it did not put the grenade in the demonstrator’s hand; that was put there by the war in Donbass. And this is the sad reality that neither helps to stop the war in the east nor to further political and economic reforms in the country.
Some people think the challenges faced by Ukraine’s Poroshenko are now too big to overcome. But those who would like to take his place have not shown themselves capable of doing even half of what he has achieved. © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
