Ukraine’s law enforcement clashes with Azov movement
Ukrainian law enforcers violently clashed with members of
the far right Azov movement on August 14 as the authorities attempted to crack
down on the criminal schemes the movement uses to make money.
Police officers and a National Guard serviceman were injured
after they tried to halt a group of Azov protesters moving towards Bankova, the
presidential offices in Kyiv. They tried to search the members of Azov but were
assaulted by the protesters. Several police offices were injured and taken to
hospital for treatment.
"The police decided to inspect the items that the
[Azov] protesters could bring to the President's Office. However, the activists
categorically refused to be inspected and were given a command to attack the
National Police and the Guard,” the head of the National Police Igor Klimenko
said in a statement.
"We are against provocations and for the peaceful
conduct of any action. The presence of police officers and the National Guard
are the necessary measures to ensure order in the area where the actions are
held," he added.
Azov has been a hugely controversial movement since it
sprang to prominence during the 2014 Maidan revolution. Its militias have also
prominently served on the front line in the undeclared war with Russia in the
Donbas.
The group openly glorifies the Nazis and regularly holds
rallies using symbolism that blatantly evokes Hitler’s rallies and the other
trappings of the Nazi era. And yet the authorities have done little to curb or
control the group.
Their presence in the demonstrations and street fighting
with former president Viktor Yanukovych’s police in 2014 led the Kremlin to
claim that Maidan was a right wing-driven coup d'état, a claim that was
virulently denied at the time by pro-Ukrainian commentators, but in retrospect
clearly has an element of truth.
After the regime change the group was quietly subsumed into
the Ukrainian military as a separate unit but it maintains its own clear
identity and enjoys close ties with senior figures in the government. It has
been allowed to continue to operate its criminal schemes with impunity.
At home the group ran various schemes and have been accused
of racketeering and extortion. The group has been associated with the recently
departed powerful interior minister Arsen Avakov and the police action this
weekend is believed by commentators to be a result of a house cleaning now that
his protection has been withdrawn.
Considered to be the second most powerful man in the
country, who served under four prime ministers and was also the longest serving
minister in office, Avakov submitted his resignation on July 13, without giving
a reason for his decision.
His departure was seem by some analysts as part of a
government shake up by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is trying
to consolidate his grip on power as part of a slow moving crackdown on
corruption.
Zelenskiy nominated Denys Monastyrskyi to replace Avakov.
Monastyrskyi is a lawyer and a member of Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People
party. The former head of the parliament’s Law Enforcement Committee,
Monastyrskyi’s appointment gives Zelenskiy more direct control over the police
force and Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).
Avakov’s resignation may be connected to Zelenskiy’s
crackdown on the influence of the oligarchs, analysts have speculated. Avakov
allied himself with business magnate and Zelenskiy’s former business partner
Ihor Kolomoisky in 2014 when they began creating volunteer battalions fighting
Russia and its proxies in eastern Ukraine. This alliance appears to have
remained in place, reports the Kyiv Post.
Under US pressure Zelenskiy launched a campaign with an
oligarch speech in March and since then has passed a number of laws restricting
their contacts with government as well as closing some of the loopholes that
allowed them to run economic rent schemes that have made them fabulously
wealthy. At the same time Zelenskiy appears to be trying to crack down on
corruption in general as several middle tier officials have been arrested
recently on corruption charges. Most notably several senior managers of
PrivatBank, that used to belong to Kolomoisky who is accused of stealing $5.5bn
from the bank, were arrested or had arrest warrants issued in their names in
February.
Far right and Belarus opposition
Azov is deeply entrenched in Ukraine. The group also has
multiple ties with leading Belarusian opposition figures, many of whom have
maintained close ties with Azov members in a fact that the international media
remains squeamish about reporting. The Kremlin’s claims that Maidan was a far
right coup contradict the western narrative that Maidan was a popular uprising
by regular Ukrainians yearning to join Europe and so the bulk of international
reporting on Ukraine has become shy of the topic of Ukraine’s very obvious
problem with far right affiliations.
Every year the far right stage a major torch lit march down
Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, attended by thousands of aficionados,
some of whom are in full Nazi uniform, but the event is regularly ignored by
the international press, or at best given a couple of column inches. This year
it was not reported at all. Likewise, the ties between prominent Belarusian
opposition figures and Azov have been sparsely reported.
As bne IntelliNews has reported there is a values fault line
that runs down the middle of Europe to the right of which values are distinctly
less liberal than to the left – including affiliation with far right ideas. For
example, despite the Baltic states’ reputation for adoption of European values,
the region remains homophobic and also has Nazi sympathisers that regularly
parade in public.
The former editor-in-chief of the Belarusian Telegram
channel Nexta Roman Protasevich became a cause célèbre after Belarus' President
Alexander Lukashenko forced a commercial Ryanair flight to land in Minsk and
arrested Protasevich and his girlfriend on May 23.
According to creditable reports Protasevich served with an
Azov battalion in Donbas and photos have emerged of him in uniform carrying a
machine gun. Protasevich does not deny either serving with Azov nor being on
the frontline in Donbas, but claims he was there exclusively as a photographer
and did not fight. However, no photos or stories have been produced to support
this version of events.
A man who bears a very strong resemblance to Protasevich
appeared on the cover of the Azov recruitment magazine “The Black Sun” in
uniform and carrying a weapon, in a photo that has been widely shared on
Russian social media claiming it is Protasevich.
Vitaly Shishov, the head of Belarusian House, an opposition
group that offers aid to Belarusians that flee to Ukraine, was found hanged in
a tree in a Kyiv park on August 3. Shishov also had close ties to Azov via his
fellow Belarus House partner Rodion Batulin and Sergey Korotkikh, a Belarusian
with ties to Russia’s FSB and one of the founders of Russia’s largest neo-nazi
platform before moving to Ukraine and joining Azov.
A day after Shishov was found hanged in a park, with bruises
on his body, his partner Batulin, an MMA fighter and also an Azov veteran from
Latvia, was banned from entering Ukraine by the SBU as a “threat to national
security” but no further details were given.
Batulin is also an associate of Korotkikh, who claims to
know Shishov and rose to prominence in Ukraine where president Poroshenko
granted him citizenship after two years and personally handed him a new
passport.
Korotkikh is believed to be running the Azov movement’s
business operations, according to Leonid Ragozin, a prominent Russian
journalist based in Latvia who previously worked for the BBC, who wrote a long
thread on Shishov’s story.
“A week ago, SBU clamped down on Azov’s racketeering
business in Kharkiv, the movement’s alma mater. Seven men, including some, but
not all, of the top figures got arrested,” Ragozin reported. The arrests came
shortly before Batulin attempted to re-enter Ukraine and some analysts have
linked the two events, although the authorities have said little about either
incident.
Shishov’s Azov connection confuses the investigation into
his death and police say they have not ruled out “murder dressed up as
suicide”. Shishov friends that have seen the corpse report that his face was
bloodied and his nose broken, strongly suggesting foul play.
Commentators have suggested that Shishov was killed by
Belarusian KGB agents working in Ukraine and Shishov also reportedly said he
believed he was being followed in the weeks before his death. Protasevich also
reported that he was being followed by “Russian speaking” men, that he assumed
were KGB agents, while in Athens shortly before boarding his fateful flight
home. The KGB hit squad remains the most likely option, but his association
with Azov, which engages in criminal activities and is well known for its
violence, adds a new confusing element to the story.
An investigation into Shishov published after his death
suggests that he was not deeply involved in Azov, nor its business, and the
main interest Azov had in Belarus House was as a recruiting platform for its
own movement as well as a money-making scheme: Belarus House would charge
immigrants fees of up to several thousand dollars to help expedite getting
Ukrainian residency documents amongst other services.
Following the operation in Kharkiv where several Azov
members were arrested an anonymous video was sent to several Ukrainian
bloggers, which contained footage purporting that Korotkikh agreed to be an FSB
agent during a crackdown on his Nazi network in Russia 15 years ago, reported
Ragozin.
“The footage must have been somehow leaked from the FSB (or
released by it),” Ragozin speculated.
During his years in Russia Korotkikh spent two years
training at the FSB academy and is assumed to have maintained ties to the
Russian security forces.
Then on August 9, the Azov movement leadership claimed that
the SBU was planning a raid on its main base at Atek plant in Kiev, which
houses a recruitment centre, barracks and Azov’s own sergeant school of dubious
legality, Ragozin reported. The promised raid failed to materialise.
Last week the leaders of the Azov movement began to
publically accuse President Zelenskiy of “mopping up patriots and veterans” in
preparation toforsigning a humiliating peace deal with Russia, although no deal
is anticipated and Bankova and the Kremlin have little direct reported contact.
Nevertheless Avoz announced a protest action outside Zelenskiy’s office where
the bloody clash with police took place.
“Does it all mean that Korotkikh, an extremely dark and
controversial figure as he is, could be linked to the death of his protégé,
Vitaly Shishov? Not necessarily,” said Ragozin. “The suspected assassination
and subsequent events come in the wake of the resignation of interior minister
Arsen Avakov, the political patron of Azov movement. They should be understood
in the context of long-running standoff between SBU and interior ministry.”
A bitter rivalry between far right groups, associated with
SBU, on the one side and the Azov movement on the other is one of several
manifestations of that confrontation.
The role Avoz and the far right groups play in Ukrainian
politics remains very murky. Senior members of government have been frequently
seen in the company of Azov leaders as well as the elite of other extreme
groups such as Evgen Karass, the leader of C14, another notorious far right
group, who was invited to a ceremony also attended by Poroshenko, while he was
still president.
SBU-linked groups feature in several investigations into
political assassinations in post-Maidan Ukraine, said Ragozin, who is writing a
book about the death of journalist Pavel Sheremet, another Belarusian who also
had ties with Azov and was killed with a car bomb in 2016.
“Bottom line, it’s hard to pin down anyone in those games of
security bodies and freelancing far right thugs with their shifting loyalties.
From previous experience, sadly, it is unlikely that official investigation
will end up with a definitive answer as to who killed Shishov,” said Ragozin.
Comments
Post a Comment