Oct.8, 2015.There’s a reason most revolutions in Eastern Europe begin in the winter, from Russia in 1905 to Ukraine’s Maidan in 2013. Once the cold settles in, a government’s empty promises are laid bare. Over the next several days, forecasters are predicting, the temperature in Ukraine will plunge to freezing. When President Petro Poroshenko looks at the thermometer, he should be worried.
Ukrainians are seething with anger over the plunging quality of life and the government’s failure to purge the country of oligarchy and corruption, the very issues that ignited the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising in the first place. This is not Kremlin propaganda. A Washington Post article in August spoke of the “sense that last year’s wave of protests delivered little but fresh misery.” A recent Atlantic Council report states that “[i]f the Ukrainian government does not follow through with an ambitious reform agenda, public support for reforms will wane while dissatisfaction will increase, threatening political stability and the country’s successful future.” Even George Soros, a stalwart backer of Kiev, wrote this month that “the general population is increasingly dissatisfied both with the slow speed of reforms and the continued decline in living standards.”
If Ukraine were a stable country, this mounting public disillusionment would manifest itself through an unseating of the ruling party in the next election or perhaps through a referendum of no confidence in the administration. But Ukraine — fresh off a revolution followed by 19 months of war — is far from stable. Its citizens have more weapons than they do trust in their government. If the average Ukrainian can’t scrape together enough money to feed and heat his family in the brutal Ukrainian winter, he will blame Kiev (and the West) and express his outrage not at the polls, but in the streets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the only one who would love to see the Poroshenko government fail. Ukraine has an active far-right movement composed of ultranationalist groups, organizations that combine radical political agendas (with racist and homophobic overtones) with sizable paramilitary formations. Some of these groups, such as Svoboda, began as far-right political parties that were on the margins of Ukraine’s politics before Maidan. Others, like Right Sector, were formed out of paramilitary groups of street fighters that merged into a movement during the uprising. As the war against Russia-backed separatists unfolded, these organizations formed volunteer battalions that proved crucial in containing the separatists.
As with many things in Ukraine, the far right’s numbers, as well as the extent of Kiev’s control over their battalions, remains nebulous. In July, Right Sector’s Dmytro Yarosh was able to call up around 5,000 members for a march in Kiev, though how many of the participants were fighters as opposed to party supporters is unclear. Likewise, the Azov Battalion, which has been banned from receiving U.S. training and weapons by Congress, has been nominally under Kiev’s control when it comes to fighting separatists; where Azov’s loyalty lies when it comes to facing Kiev is an open question.
What is clear is that these groups are capable of sowing immense chaos and carnage, as was proved on Aug. 31, when grenade-wielding thugs from Svoboda killed four Ukrainian National Guardsmen and wounded 138 others in front of the parliament building in Kiev. This attack was far from the first time that the far right has threatened Kiev or spilled blood: On July 11, Right Sector was involved in a deadly shootout with police in the western Ukrainian town of Mukacheve, and members of several battalions have threatened a coup after the fighting in the east is concluded.
Up to this point, more or less, the far right and Kiev have shared a common enemy: Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. But as the violence in the eastern regions abates, the ultranationalists — including their affiliated (and heavily armed) battalions — are turning their attention inward. Over the past several months, these groups have been increasingly ratcheting up the pressure on Poroshenko, declaring his administration to be an “internal occupation” and calling, as Right Sector put it, for the “new phase” of the revolution.
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