Despite the previous bellicose rhetoric, the “Right Sector” meeting on the Maidan actually turned out to be a fume.
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In total, about two to three thousand people gathered. The start of the rally was preceded by a half-hour religious ritual, during which priests of different faiths and military chaplains chanted prayers for the victory of the Ukrainian army and the well-being of Ukraine.
The first to give the floor was the elder of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Levka Lukyanenko, who served almost 30 years in prison during Soviet times. In a rather lengthy speech, he complained that his age does not allow him to take up arms and expressed full support for the actions of the Right Sector in Mukachevo.
Approximately the same rhetoric was used in the speech of Stepan Khmara, who was also repeatedly arrested during Soviet times, including for attacking a law enforcement officer in 1990.
Almost all the speakers, including Lukyanenko and Khmara, spoke about the “regime of internal occupation”, the “second front” and scolded the authorities for not living up to the hopes of the Maidan.
The Maidan centurion and now people's deputy Vladimir Parasyuk, who was captured after the defeat of the Ukrainian group in the Ilovaisk cauldron and taken, according to him, by GRU officers to the Russian Federation, where, according to Parasyuk, they could not establish his real name.
The last to speak was the leader of right-wing radicals Dmitry Yarosh, who was greeted by those gathered with applause and shouts of support. Unlike those gathered, the journalists did not expect any radical calls from him, since even before the start of the meeting, media representatives asked Yarosh whether this event could be considered the beginning of a new Maidan, and received a categorical “No” in response.
In his speech, Yarosh did not assess the Mukachevo events, saying only that a dozen of their fighters were attacked by forces that would be enough to liberate Donetsk. He also announced the continuation of the revolution and the fight against internal occupiers, but peacefully.
“Many people think that the Right Sector are little fish that will peck at the bait of Putin and his gang,” Yarosh noted. – In fact, it won’t be like that. They expected us to go and destroy the administrative buildings and so on. We show that we are a disciplined revolutionary force, which with this assembly and our congress is beginning a new stage of the Ukrainian revolution.”
Next, the PS leader reported on the decisions taken at the congress. In particular, that the organization initiates an all-Ukrainian referendum on the following issues:
1) distrust of the authorities;
2) official recognition of the war with Russia instead of the ATO;
3) complete blockade of the “occupied territories”;
4) legalization of the DUK “Right Sector” and other volunteer units.
It was also said that the congress decided to rename the “military-political movement “Right Sector” into the “national liberation movement “Right Sector”.
“Literally from tomorrow, operational headquarters for the referendum will be created in all regions of Ukraine, in each regional center, and they will play the role of certain revolutionary committees,” Yarosh finally promised. “I ask you to actively join this work, because we can sweep away the internal occupation regime and defeat the terrible external enemy of Putin and his gang.”
At the same time, Yarosh’s former comrades in the Right Sector, who were related to the Social National Assembly, in a conversation with a PolitNavigator correspondent who asked to evaluate the veche, were skeptical about Yarosh’s revolutionary attempts.
“This is not a revolution, but, in fact, the beginning of the Right Sector election campaign before the local elections,” they believe. – It seems that a parliamentary mandate turns a nationalist revolutionary into a supporter of exclusively parliamentary methods. A similar situation, by the way, happened with Andrei Biletsky, who, having become a deputy, dissolved the SNA and actually fell under the head of trash Avakov.”