Apr 1, 2015

Right Sector will become autonomous territorial defense organization

The leader of Right Sector Dmitri Yarosh at a Dnipropetrovsk mall on March 28, the day a rally for “United Ukraine” was held in the city.

Fort Russ writes:

Rada Deputy and Ukrainian nationalist leader Dmitriy Yarosh announced that a procedure for incorporating the Right Sector into the UAF as an subordinate organization had been agreed upon. The two sides agreed at a closed meeting between Ukrainian MOD representatives and Yarosh in Dnepropetrovsk to adopt as a model the cooperation between the Tallinn government and the Estonia Defense Union, which began in the early 1990s. …

J.Hawk’s Comment: This is actually a sign of weakness on part of Poroshenko, not quite the “night of long knives”, but rather an “evening of short letter openers”. It’s one of several instances in recent days where Poroshenko, when trying to confront the right-wing nationalists, blinked first. One would think that he would follow up the success against Kolomoysky by mopping up the right-wing paramilitaries which represent the biggest threat to his own power at the moment. But instead he made them even more of a danger, both to himself and to the country as a whole.

Conversely, the granting of autonomous status to the Right Sector makes Yarosh more powerful, and it’s not even clear whether Poroshenko was able to peel Yarosh away from Kolomoysky, who may well continue to fund the Right Sector, now a perfectly legal organization and moreover one with specific security responsibilities, thanks to its autonomous status. So now the Ukrainian neo-Nazis have a perfectly legal cover for conducting paramilitary training, something they could not have dreamed of before the Maidan. Ukraine is still firmly on course for its Doomsday.