Ukraine’s ultranationalist movement Right Sector has launched a nationwide mobilization and is withdrawing from the Donbass conflict zone following deadly clashes with police near the southwestern town of Mukachevo on Saturday.
Sunday, July 12
Right Sector fighters, who were blockaded by security forces near the town of Mukachevo, have managed to escape, Vasily Guban, the governor of the Zakarpattia Region, said.
“The armed Right Sector members will be tracked down. At the moment, their whereabouts is unknown. They never gave up their weapons and didn’t contact the police,” Guban said, as cited by Ukraine’s 24 channel.
Right Sector activists are holding rallies in 17 cities across Ukraine in support of the radicals blockaded by authorities after the shootout in Mukachevo, the organization’s website said.
“The protests have been announced in Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, Zaporozhye, Ternopol, Mariupol, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Poltava and other cities of Ukraine,” the statement reads.
Right Sector spokesman Andrey Sharaskin told Ukraine’s 112 channel that all of the organization’s fighters have left their positions in the country’s eastern Donetsk Region, where Kiev is conducting a military operation against rebels, and returned to their bases.
“Over 10,000 [Right Sector] activists have been mobilized all across Ukraine” due to tensions with the authorities, Sharaskin added.
Two injured Right Sector fighters from the group of radicals blocked in by the police after a shootout in Mukachevo have given themselves up to the Ukrainian authorities, Anton Geraschenko, an interior ministry adviser, said.
According to the medics, two young men, one born in 1990 and one in 1998, have been hospitalized with a fractured arm and leg between them.
Right Sector spokesman, Artem Skoropadsky said that nothing has changed under Poroshenko’s rule compared to the times of his predecessor Viktor Yanukovich, whom the Right Sector helped to oust in February 2014.
The current president is to blame for “chaos, murder, corruption, lack of lustration, the return of old Yanukovich era officials, lack of reform and everything that is happening now,” he stressed.
Right Sector has around 20 reserve battalions in Lvov, northwestern Ukraine, the southern city of Krivoy Rog and elsewhere in the country – and those units are ready to act if the Ukrainian authorities decided to take a stand against the radical nationalists, Right Sector spokesman, Artem Skoropadsky, said.
“The Right Sector is the party of direct action. If they will not hear us, we will have to communicate in other ways,” Skoropadsky said.
He threatened to dispatch all reserve battalions to “the presidential administration and the Interior Ministry so that [Interior Minister Arsen] Avakov and President [Petro Poroshenko] could themselves witness the number of people in the Right Sector.”
During a press conference in Kiev, Right Sector spokesman, Artem Skoropadsky, said the organization’s leader, Dmitry Yarosh, has not given an order to his fighters to lay down their arms.
“Until such an order is given they (the fighters) are not going to surrender or give up their weapons,” Skoropadsky stressed.
Right Sector militants set up a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kiev on Sunday, following deadly clashes between the group and police in Mukachevo which reportedly caused two deaths and more injuries.
Ukrainian security forces began evacuating civilians living in the vicinity of Mukachevo overnight as negotiations with Right Sector fighters failed.
“Taking into account the danger for the villagers in the area where the so-called Right Sector militants barricaded themselves, the evacuation of civilians, especially children, is being carried out,” the SBU statement reads.
Saturday, July 11
The fighting between Right Sector militants and security forces in the western Ukrainian town was caught on camera.
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