Alexander Musytchko
By Ulrich Rippert, wsws.org
Two events this week have exposed the propaganda used by the German government and its allies to justify their actions in Ukraine: the death of Alexander Musytchko and a telephone conversation with Yulia Timoschenko, which was intercepted and made public.
Musytchko, coordinator of the fascist Right Sector in western Ukraine, was shot on Monday in a police operation near the west Ukrainian town of Rivne. Reports on his death are contradictory.
Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Yevdokimov stated that Musytchko, who was wanted for “malicious hooliganism and resisting state forces,” was killed during an exchange of shots with the police when he put up armed resistance to his arrest.
By contrast, Right Sector activists claim that their leader was in fact executed. They said that armed men arrived in two VW buses and forced Musytchko and five others to leave a cafe in Rivne. Behind the cafe, they made sure that Musytchko was not wearing a bulletproof vest and then killed him with two shots in the heart.
The Right Sector militants have sworn they will avenge themselves on Interior Minister Arsen Asakov.
Sections of the German media tried to portray the police action against Musytchko as a welcome step in the direction of the rule of law. In fact, it reveals the character of the fascist and criminal elements upon which the West has relied to overthrow elected president Victor Yanukovitch and bring a more compliant regime to power.
The circumstances of Musytchko’s killing recall the Röhm putsch through which Hitler eliminated the leadership of the SA storm troopers in 1934 after they had fulfilled their task, rather than any move towards the rule of law.
Alexander Musytchko, better known by the name “white Sascha,” was deputy commander of Right Sector, which played a decisive role in forcing President Yanukovitch from power in February’s coup.
As leader of the paramilitary Ukrainian national assembly–Ukrainian national self-defence (UNA-UNSO), Musytchko, who had a long criminal career behind him, controlled the most militant wing of Right Sector. According to his credo, he would “fight communists, Jews and Russians as long as blood flows through my veins.”
Already in 1995, A Ukrainian court found Musytchko guilty of grievous bodily harm, and in 2003, he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for bribery. In the mid-1990s, he fought on the side of Chechen rebels against Russian government troops. At that time, he was head of a Ukrainian terrorist organisation called Viking and was the bodyguard of Chechnya’s separatist president Dudayev for a time.
Russian authorities issued an international warrant for his arrest, because he allegedly brutally tortured at least 20 imprisoned Russian soldiers in the Caucasus before killing them. “White Sascha” responded to the warrant by promising a reward of $10-$12 million to anyone who could “eliminate” Putin.
After the overthrow of Yanukovitch, Musytchko was heavily involved in acts of violence, intimidation and arbitrary measures against political opponents.
The day after the right-wing coup, he appeared in a military uniform at the regional parliament in the Rivne administrative district brandishing a Kalashnikov. He then forced a parliamentary sitting to implement his demands. These included the provision of accommodation for his supporters in Right Sector.
Three days later, he stormed the office of the district administrator of Rivne with a group of supporters and assaulted him on camera. The courts investigated complaints and statements according to which Musytchko and his supporters had arbitrarily confiscated cars and occupied houses.
When the new government in Kiev issued a warrant for his arrest, Musytchko threatened Interior Minister Asakov that he would “hang by the legs like a dog and be exterminated.”
Shortly thereafter, Musytchko was liquidated in a police operation.
Interior Minister Asakov is a member of Yulia Timoschenko’s Fatherland Party, which is also far from squeamish in its dealings with political opponents. The Western media has portrayed Timoschenko, who made millions in the gas industry in the 1990s, as an icon of the Orange Revolution and a fighter for democracy. However, an excerpt of a telephone call between Timoschenko and her close ally Nestor Chufritch appeared on the Internet on Tuesday, which exposed the “icon” as a vulgar, unscrupulous criminal driven by hatred.
It was necessary to seize arms and get rid of the Russians and their leaders, she declared, obviously referring to Vladimir Putin. She was “ready to hold a pistol and shoot the bastard in the brain.” Responding to the question of how the 8 million Russians on Ukrainian territory should be dealt with, she answered that they should “be targeted by nuclear weapons.”
Moreover, her discussion was full of obscene and insulting terms. She used the disparaging description “kazap” for Russians and peppered “the dialogue with all sorts of Russian swearwords, which are disingenuously translated with terms like ‘damned,’ ‘dirt’ and ‘Russian dogs’,” as Der Spiegel wrote.
Timoschenko subsequently confirmed the authenticity of the discussion on Twitter while declaring that her statement about the 8 million Russians had been passed on incorrectly.
Timoschenko’s hatred-filled tirades, which threaten to provoke civil war, even compelled the German government to distance itself from the leader of the Fatherland Party whom Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously repeatedly met and admitted to Germany for specialised medical treatment. Government spokesman Stefan Seibert declared on the chancellor’s behalf that there were “limits to speech and thought which should not be breached.” Timoschenko’s fantasies of violence were “beyond that limit.”
This did not prevent Timoschenko, however, from announcing on Thursday her candidacy in the Ukrainian presidential elections.
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