Front and Center in Ukraine Race

Front and Center in Ukraine Race, a Leader of the Far Right
By ANDREW E. KRAMERMARCH 11, 2014 Photo
Dmytro Yarosh, shown last month in Independence Square in Kiev, is running for president. CreditDavid Mdzinarishvili/Reuters Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
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KIEV, Ukraine During the Independence Square protests, Dmytro Yarosh made a name for himself as an expert with firebombs. Now, just weeks later,
Mr. Yarosh, leader of the right-wing coalition known as Right Sector, says he is running for president. When Russias politicized state media talk about the neo -fascists and antiSemites who pulled off what the Kremlin calls a coup in Kiev and are now supposedly threatening Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they have men like Mr. Yarosh in mind. But who these men really are and what they stand for, outside the caricatures in the Russian medias fun-house mirror, are not always clear. Other than his unstinting nationalism, penchant for secrecy and leadership role in the street fighting, little is publicly known of Mr. Yarosh, beyond that he is 42, a graduate of a teachers college and a man who has been active in Ukraines once-fringe right-wing politics for most of his life. In one of his first public appearances over the weekend, Mr. Yarosh, who has the buzz cut and tightly coiled mannerisms of a military man, arrived at a hotel conference room in a scrum of bodyguards with pistols, all dressed in black. Newly appointed to the position of deputy director of Ukraines security council, he is clearly riding the popularity of the street fighters to stake a claim to a role in the political future of Ukraine. Continue reading the main story
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Mr. Yarosh has hinted at a role for his group in balancing the influence of a longtime player in Ukrainian politics, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the former prime minister who emerged from prison after the fall of the old government with members of her political party, Fatherland, already holding the positions of acting president and prime minister. Before the protests, the nationalist party Svoboda had occupied the nationalist niche to the right of Ms. Tymoshenko. But Svoboda and Fatherland are now allied. Mr. Yaroshs ambitions, observers of Ukrainian politics say, fall well short of winning a national election but do include supplanting Svoboda as the leading right-wing party. Mr. Yaroshs bid for office, political commentators here say, is best understood as the latest maneuver in the ceaseless churn and infighting among the leadership of western Ukrainian nationalist groups White Hammer, Patriots of Ukraine and the Trident of Stepan Bandera, the organization Mr. Yarosh helped found in the early 1990s. Setting this contest, between Svoboda and Right Sector, apart are the extraordinarily high geopolitical stakes today in a crisis the British foreign minister called the worst in Europe of the 21st century. A lot of people fear that Maidan brought to power the old establishment, said Vadim Karasev, director of the Institute of Global Strategy, a policy research organization in Kiev, referring to the protest site. In that atmosphere, he added, Mr. Yarosh has a distinct advantage: He popped out of the square like a jack-in-the-box. In outlining his platform on Saturday, Mr. Yarosh made a conciliatory opening statement in Russian and then described a political agenda that includes
reimposing Ukrainian as the countrys official language, signing a trade agreement with the European Union but not seeking full membership, and instituting a top-to-bottom reform of the Interior Ministry. Mr. Yarosh called for a European embargo on Russian oil and gas purchases. Continue reading the main story
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Continue reading the main story In contrast, the interim government led by the acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov of the Fatherland party, has vetoed a law that would have eliminated Russian as a second official language and is striving to work with the existing police force, domestic intelligence agency personnel and army rather than immediately instituting sweeping changes. For the interim government, Right Sector has been invaluable in securing power, and potentially acting as a deterrent against any Russian intervention in the rest of Ukraine. On the other hand, the group has been named by the Kremlin as a justification for its military intervention. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said on Saturday that the interim government, to our huge regret, is dependent on the radical nationalists who seized power in an armed attack. Mr. Lavrov said, Effectively, there is no state control whatsoever over public order, and the music is dictated by the so-called Right Sector, which operates by the methods of terror and intimidation. As Right Sector has made the transition into politics, its leadership has moved from an occupied post office into rooms at a hotel near Independence Square. The group still keeps stocks of beer bottles filled with gasoline on the sidewalk outside, even though there are no longer any riot police officers to fight. They are very theatrical, Per Anders Rudling, an expert on Ukrainian extremist ideologies at Lund University in Sweden, said of the western Ukrainian nationalists. They have a lot of flags and parades. Hard -line imagery plays well in the west of the country, he said. They dont have political correctness. The Svoboda party, meanwhile, has moderated, and did not openly endorse the tactic of throwing firebombs when street fighting began in January. Svoboda was founded in 1991 under the name the Socialist-Nationalist Party of Ukraine, with a symbol that resembled a swastika. Its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, met Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday and in December appeared onstage with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Svoboda holds 37 seats in Parliament.
Even with the widespread admiration for its role in toppling the loathed former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, Right Sector is not likely to win more than about 5 percent in any national election, political experts say. Recent polls show that Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch and owner of the Roshen confectionary company, leading in the presidential race, with the election scheduled for May 25. He is followed by the former champion boxer Vitali Klitschko, Ms. Tymoshenko and Serhei Tihipko, a former chairman of the national bank. At his news conference, Mr. Yarosh took pains to reach out to Russian speakers and to convey a message of moderation. He said that Right Sector was against xenophobia and against anti-Semitism, and that about 40 percent of its members are native speakers of Russian, and many of those from eastern Ukraine, just as he is. On Independence Square, which remains symbolically important for the new government, Right Sector is raising its profile, changing the character of the plaza. Black-clad men walk about with pistols. On Tuesday, several dozen such activists pushed into a City Council meeting in small city near Kiev, Borodyanka, to support, they said, their candidate for mayor in a vote. Right Sector, Mr. Yarosh said, was set up as a platform for revolutionary young people, and is only now evolving into a political organization. One of its constituent groups, the Ukrainian Nationalist Assembly, is already a political party and could form the kernel of a future party, though its platform would be rewritten, he said. Mr. Yarosh said Right Sector was not about to disband its paramilitary units. He said they were needed to maintain a deterrent against Russia, while Moscow says they are used to maintain control over the interim government by using street muscle to intimidate lawmakers. We are against witch hunts, Mr. Yarosh said. Right Sector has not beaten up any members of Parliament.

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Front and Center in Ukraine Race, a Leader of the Far Right

By ANDREW E. KRAMERMARCH 11, 2014 Photo

Ukraine Crisis in Maps

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