It has yet to be reported in major western newspapers that the new government installed in Ukraine on February 26, after the deposition and flight of Viktor Yanukovych, includes eight figures associated with Ukraines far right. The positions they have filled are not insignificant. They include deputy prime minister, chief prosecutor, defense minister and head of the national-security council, portfolios where the coercive power of the state resides. Svoboda, the main nationalist party, has made some attempt to shed its fascist lineage, but the World Jewish Congress last year asked the EU to consider banning it, and there is much in its history and outlook that should be deeply troubling to westerners. Dmytro Yarosh, head of the Right Sector, is Deputy Secretary of National Security in the interim government; among his comrades are men who joined in fighting the Russians in Chechnya, and who see the Chechens as their allies. Right Sector is a paramilitary organization, like Greeces Golden Dawn; their entry into a European government is an important milestone, and not of the celebratory sort.
The amazing thing is that the composition of the new government has attracted no attention. None of the major newspapersI checked the FT, New York Times, and Wall Street Journalhad seen fit to report it (as of Saturday, March 8, two weeks after the announcements). On March 5, Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com published a full investigation; Raimandos column was itself partially based on a March 5 story by Britains Channel 4. But it is still not news in mainstream media land.
Incredibly, the Times stories of February 26 and 27, reporting the composition of the government, made no mention of the success of Svoboda and Right Sector in gaining key government portfolios; instead, the gist of the stories was on the order of previously obscure citizens gain government posts, after having led demonstrations. It was difficult to see the transition as anything other than a wholesome tribute to civil society, with ordinary people seizing control of their own affairs: here a doctor helping out with field hospitals, now made the minister of health, there a protest organizer, now crowned minister of youth and sports. One guy, whom the Times called the Ryan Seacrest of the civic uprising, gets the culture ministry; another, a female journalist, lands the leadership of an anti-corruption bureau that doesnt yet exist. David Herszenhorn of the Times did mention, at the end of his piece, that Andrew Parubiy, a member of Parliament and leader of the protest movement, was chosen as the head of the national security council. But he did not mention that Parubiy, in Channel 4s summary, was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler's Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians. The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok was one of the three most high profile leaders of the Euromaidan protestsnegotiating directly with the Yanukovych regime.
The Economist has also not seen fit to mention the presence of Svoboda and Right Sector in the government. In its latest briefing it writes, cryptically: Right wing extremists and nationalists did take part in the revolution, but they do not control the government. In other words, its a non-issue and not worth reporting.
The ideological outlook of Svoboda and other elements of the Ukrainian far-right are explored by Pers Anders Rudling, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, who was interviewed by Channel 4. In a 2013 book chapter available on his personal website, The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda, he traces the efforts of the preceding Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, to revise historical understanding by rehabilitating perpetrators of mass ethnic violence against national minorities. By glorifying Stepan Bandera and other OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) leaders as national heroes, Yushchenko and his legitimizing historians helped mobilize the neo-fascist hard right. With few exceptions, democratic Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals failed to speak up or quietly went along with a cult of the OUN that celebrated [its leaders] out of context and treated them as the persons they would have liked them to be, rather than the ideologues and political activists they actually were.
