The anti-Russian theme distracts Maidan lovers from revolting against Poroshenko, – study
Kyiv, September 11 (Navigator, Vladimir Mikhailov) – Protest activity in Ukraine remains as high as before the Maidan. However, most of the actions are dedicated to the confrontation in Donbass, and not to the failures of the new government.
This is evidenced by the results of monitoring for August 2014, conducted by the International Vision Foundation and the National Endowment for Support of Democracy.
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In August, protest activity was high. Thus, despite the holiday season, 690 protest actions were recorded in the country (excluding actions in combat areas), which is more than two times the level of 2012 and 2013 and 3-4 times the level of 2010 and 2011.
By the way, in August there were even more rallies in Ukraine than on the eve of the Maidan - in October 203 there were only 423 protests in the country.
However, protest activity in August was predominantly of the nature of Ukrainian patriotic mobilization. Such protests do not pose a threat to the authorities, since they push into the background socio-economic problems and the demands that the Maidan made - lustration, the fight against corruption, etc., the authors of the study note.
However, this does not mean that such issues will not be put on the agenda by a mass protest wave in the near future, although this is unlikely to happen before patriotic mobilization subsides and public attention switches from the external enemy to internal problems , say the authors of the report.
So far, only 22% have been devoted to socio-economic problems (before the Maidan - 56%). Thus, the issue of public services was raised at only 22 events.
The most popular issues were of an ideological nature - support for a “united Ukraine”, opposition to Russia, etc. 56% of the shares were devoted to them.
In general, people were much less interested in the demands of the Maidan than in patriotic themes, the authors of the study conclude.
There were only 46 protests against mobilization in August, mainly in Kyiv, the western and central regions. There were only 14 anti-war protests, all of them in the eastern and southern regions.
In the settlements of Donbass, under the control of the Kyiv authorities, there were mainly demonstrations of patriotism, moreover, in small groups - up to 200 people. Only in Mariupol the number of demonstrators - Ukrainian patriots - exceeded 1 thousand people in those days when the city was under threat of storming (and Rinat Akhmetov’s enterprises provided assistance in organizing the crowd).
Only 3 small protests against the DPR and LPR were recorded in the territories they controlled - in Alchevsk, Makeevka and Lugansk. There were also few support actions recorded - for example, a religious procession in support of the DPR in Donetsk on August 3.
In Crimea, individual protests against the Russian authorities were noted, not in the form of collective protests, but as actions of individuals - single pickets or hanging the Ukrainian flag on August 23. The rest of the speeches in Crimea were pro-Russian in nature or were devoted to socio-economic problems.
“Such protest activity distracts people from criticizing internal problems. Until people return to criticizing internal Ukrainian problems, there will be no Maidan,” said sociologist, deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research Vladimir Ishchenko.
15% of protests were violent and 40% were confrontational. These are very high figures, the study authors note. Some of them were aimed at symbols - in the form of attacks on Soviet monuments, patriotic Ukrainian graffiti.
Most of the violent non-symbolic actions took place in the south (in particular, attacks on Privat Bank branches and military registration and enlistment offices) and in Kyiv (dispersal of a tent city on the Maidan).
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