‘No one’s planning to disarm’ Heavily armed Ukrainian nationalists face off police in bloody gunfight

On July 11, the town of Mukacheve in Ukraine’s southwest Zakarpattya Region was shaken by a heavy gunfight between between the police and members of Ukraine’s nationalist organization Pravy Sektor. The fight took place 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) from the front, in an otherwise peaceful region. Three people were killed and 11 were injured, including several locals. According to official statements, the shooting broke out over the “limits of spheres of influence.” The sphere in question seems to be cigarette smuggling. Across Ukraine, Pravy Sektor supporters have started demanding the resignation of Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. On assignment for Meduza, Kiev-based journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova investigates what really happened in Mukacheve, and whether the events are a turning point for Ukrainian politics.

Heavy duty military equipment is heading in the direction of the small town of Mukacheve in the Zakarpattya Region. Locals shout at the column: “Shame, lads! For shame!” The entrance to the town is blocked off, and checkpoints have been set up for checking all traffic moving in and out.

“This is already painfully similar to how the the local inhabitants of Slovyansk greeted the army a year ago,” read several comments below a video of the events posted on Facebook. Mukacheve has already earned the dubious nickname of the “Zakarpattya Contraband Republic.” The conflict here is already considered to be a turning point in the history of Ukraine’s controversial volunteer battalions; it’s already changed perceptions of last year’s Euromaidan revolution.

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On July 11, a gunfight broke out near a police traffic checkpoint. Three people were killed and eleven were injured. Two of the dead and four of the injured are members of Pravy Sektor – an organization considered illegal in Russia. The rest of the victims were police officers and locals. The shooting broke out after members of the far-right organization were unable to peacefully negotiate with Mikhail Lano, a Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) member and a former member of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions. The Right Sector had accused him of corruption and smuggling. According to the police, the resulting shootout featured not only assault rifles and machine guns, but also rocket-propelled grenade launchers which had been acquired at the frontlines of the conflict in the east of Ukraine (1600 kilometers from Mukacheve)

Following the gunfight, a group of supporters of Pravy Sektor fled to the Carpathian Mountains, where they are believed to be hiding currently. The leaders of the organization held a demonstration on Saturday outside the Presidential Administration in Kiev. They demanded that PM Mikhail Lano be stripped of his parliamentary immunity and that “Ukrainian Choice” leader Viktor Medvedchuk (a man widely believed to have ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin) be arrested. They also demanded the head of the Zakarpattya police be dismissed, along with the Minister of Internal Affairs, Arsen Avakov. The Right Sector has accused Avakov of failing to carry out the lustration of Zakarpattya’s local police.

Avakov, for his part, has called Pravy Sektor’s fighters “bandits” and demanded they be arrested and disarmed. “The bandits have a chance to surrender,” Avakov wrote on his Facebook page. “If the criminals refuse, then, in accordance with the law, force will be used. I am certain that the state must deliver a decisive blow to all forms of armed banditry.”

But Pravy Sektor’s fighters (some of whom are serving in volunteer battalions fighting the separatists in the east of Ukraine) have stated they have no intention of disarming, let alone handing themselves in, and that the only way to solve the current crisis peacefully is to give in to their demands. In their opinion, the shooting in Mukacheve was a demonstration of patriotism in the fight against the local mafia, and that they are “Zakarpattya’s Robin Hoods,” fighting against an unjust criminal local government.

Pravy Sektor’s press secretary, Artyom Skoropadsky, told Meduza that in Mukacheve, and across the country, the organization is “fighting with corruption and banditry.” In his words, Zakarpattya is a region in which there are “a lot of bandits” and that PM Mikhail Lano “is suspected of murdering his own criminal boss the 1990s.” According to Skoropadsky, “He was then freed from arrest by the head of the Mukacheve police, who is now the head of the Zakarpattya Region police.”

“These scumbag criminals came to us. They offered to pay us to go away, but we told them that we don’t need any criminal money from the drug trade, from cigarettes or alcohol. We want them to rot in jail. We came to them to talk, but when we arrived, they started shooting. So we acted in self-defense,” Skoropadsky told us.

PM Lano stated that he is not involved in any smuggling activities in Zakarpattya Region. “Who’s smuggling here? If anyone, it’s the customs officials, the border guards, the security services. If I were involved, there would have have be evidence, wouldn’t there?” he told Meduza. “Mr. Beloha [a local politician] has been making me out to be a crime boss for 15 years. Now it seems I’m somehow standing in his way. Local elections are coming up.”

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According to a source close to Pravy Sektor, the shootout in Mukacheve is the result of a splitting of spheres of influences among various groups engaging in illegal activities on Ukraine’s border with the European Union. PM Lano is allegedly party to these activities, which, our source said, are primarily linked to cigarette smuggling. Former Zakarpattya governor Viktor Baloha is also allegedly involved. The latter is suspected of having acted as a negotiator for Pravy Sektor (Baloha has formally denied any part in the events in an interview with Meduza). It is widely known that the leader of the Right Sector in Zakarpattya, Roman Stoiko, is a former member of the police who had already been arrested for smuggling. His father is an acquaintance of Baloha’s and a former member of Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. The head of the local SBU is the brother of former defense minister and current head of the State Security Guard Service, Viktor Heletey, who is godfather to Baloha’s son, Andrei. Andrei, for his part, is married to Heletey’s niece, Edita. In light of this, our source tells us, the recent events are the result of a conflict between the local police and the security services; members of the Right Sector knew in advance that the police were planning to make arrests at their meeting.

“It’s a simple bandits’ brawl,” Mustafa Nayyem, a member of the Verkhovna Rada, told Meduza. “A situation where the country cannot rid itself of smuggling emerged back in the 1990s, but Pravy Sektor has played the role of a racketeer. They saw illegal activity and decided that they could control it by force. But a conflict broke out which no one has bothered to hide. Why had we never heard about this contraband issue before? The Right Sector never made a single statement about it before.”

Former Interior Minister and head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc Yury Lutsenko told Meduza that events in Mukacheve “have become a focal point of two malignant phenomena: illegal formations of fighters, and an entrenched mafia.”

“No sort of patriotism can justify the presence of people armed to the teeth 1,600 kilometers from the front,” wrote Lutsenko on his Facebook page. “Criminality can’t be dressed up as a political party. No words about stability can be used to stop us from fighting smugglers and drug dealers, who openly cooperate with security services and local authorities. I have done everything possible to speed up the passing of the ‘Law on Police’ [a massive package of reforms for Ukraine’s heavily corrupt police force] because the police have proved to be openly fighting alongside organized crime groups under the protection of regional clans and under the flags of patriots.”

Nonetheless, Pravy Sektor’s leader Dmitro Yarosh is confident that his fighters “acted in self-defense.” Yarosh, who flew into Mukacheve on July 12, said that the fact the fighters were armed with weapons used at the front was “normal.”

“No one is planning to disarm,” Artyom Skoropadsky told Meduza. “The state didn’t give us these weapons. These weapons were purchased by volunteers or captured from separatists and Russian soldiers during the fighting.” When asked how these weapons ended up in a peaceful territory, he said that “There are things written in the constitution, and the constitution is more important than the laws regulating weapons… In Article 65 [of the constitution] there is an understanding that the defense of the territorial integrity of the country is the responsibility of every citizen. People who were at the front return from rotation and then go back to the front. Even in Rermarque’s [All Quiet on the Western Front], the hero goes on leave with his weapon. And in Israel, everyone walks around armed, they go to cafes with assault rifles because the situation is so tense. We also have a tense situation. You don’t know where the Kremlin could attack.”

Yarosh’s ally, Borys Filatov (who recently founded the party “Ukrop” with the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and who has previously funded Pravy Sektor) laid the blame for events at Mukacheve at the feet of the country’s leaders.

“For the last year and a half after the Maidan, the post-revolutionary authorities have been unable to get rid of the old corrupt cadres on the borders and in the law enforcement agencies, not only in Zakarpattya, but throughout the country,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “Local mafias have gone unpunished, and that’s why they can still stage provocations. The responsibility for the events in Mukacheve lies not with local patriots who clashed with organized criminal groups, but with the leadership of the state. They have made concessions to the remnants of the Yanukovych regime and to the odious people who surround them, some of whom have links with open agents of Kremlin influence. We stress that this lack of action from the authorities has forced people to stand up for justice with their own hands. We also warn the authorities of the danger of using the Mukacheve events for organizing a purge of volunteer fighters and disarming their detachments. The authorities fear them more than they fear Russian aggressors and occupiers.”

Skoropadsky told Meduza that Pravy Sektor’s members are convinced that the people support them and support their methods of fighting against corruption and banditry, and this will allow them to win seats in the next election to the Verkhovna Rada. “We want to act solely by political means. We don’t want a war within the country. We don’t want to exacerbate the situation or to shoot. But the only way out of the situation is for the authorities is to fulfill our demands,” he says.

“The role of Yarosh will be important in resolving this conflict,” Mustafa Nayyem believes. “It’s time for him to admit that Pravy Sektor has become a franchise, and anyone who wants to can use the name of the organization as cover their bad deeds. Yarosh himself probably didn’t know about the situation, but he admitted that his fighters killed a person and were walking around armed in a peaceful territory. This means he has taken responsibility for what’s happened, and he needs to denounce [his fighters] publicly. This could, however, tarnish his reputation and cause problems within the organization.”

The organization Pravy Sektor is considered to be an extremist group and is banned in Russia.