Volodymyr Ishchenko — Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a Ukrainian liberal who has finally come around to laying the cards on the table about the Right Sector in the Ukraine and the nationalist complicity with it.

…what is striking is that far-right and neo-Nazi views and connections do not seem to be problematic for either Ukrainian officials or mainstream opinion. Even the most typical line of criticism against Svoboda and the Right Sector expressed by liberal-minded people is inherently flawed. They may agree that the far right are dangerous, but they argue that the danger is that their provocative actions and statements can be exploited by Russian media to further discredit Ukraine. In this twisted logic the far right are criticised first of all for putting their partisan interests above Ukraine’s national interests. In other words, they are criticised not for being anti-democratic, reactionary, xenophobic and for propagating discriminatory ideas, but for not being nationalist enough. Even in critical discussions around the far-right appointments to high positions within law enforcement, there seem to be more worries about Ukraine’s international image than what neo-Nazis can do against political opponents and minorities and the dangerous resources they might accumulate.

Unlike Germany, the Ukraine never really faced up to its Nazi problem. Now the bill is coming due.

The Guardian
Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger
Volodymyr Ishchenko |  deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research, a member of the editorial board of Commons: Journal for Social Criticism and LeftEast web-magazine, and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology in the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

See also, Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine, Why are the Ukrainian SS being allowed to march to the Cenotaph in London on Sunday?

Veterans of Hitler’s SS and their supporters are marching this Sunday, 16 November 2014, to the cenotaph in London, in commemoration, they claim, of Ukraine’s fallen ‘in all wars’. The organisers – the ‘Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain’ and the ‘Congress of Ukrainian Youth’ – include associations of veterans of the Ukrainian Nazi volunteers ‘Waffen SS Galicia’, many of whom settled in Britain after the Third Reich’s defeat in World War II. 

By commemorating the fallen of ‘all wars’, they explicitly include those who fought with Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS in Ukraine, as well as far-right and neo-Nazi paramilitaries fighting on the side of the Kiev government in the south east of Ukraine today.

Alex Gordon of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ Union, an affiliate to the campaign Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine, said: 

“The overwhelming majority of people in London and Britain as a whole will be appalled to hear that SS veterans and their admirers are allowed to march at the cenotaph. The Ukrainian division SS Galicia murdered Jews, Poles, Russians and anyone who got in the way of their sick plans for a racially pure Ukraine. It is a sign of how far we have travelled that these people are pushing their way back into the mainstream today. It is an insult to millions who died fighting Hitler and Nazism.”