Maxim Ravreba: Ukraine is a territory of anarchy

The initial goal of the “Euromaidan” was to achieve Ukraine’s association with the European Union as a guarantee of membership in a structure where constitution and law were not just words. Hence, one more important goal was to achieve respect for constitution and law in Ukraine, a country where corruption had become a law, where you could buy everything – from driver’s license to a seat in the parliament.

But very soon the “Euromaidan” stepped beyond constitutional limits. At first, it began arming people and attacking the police. Then, it started storming administrative buildings and capturing and torturing people. And, in the end, it overthrown the existing legal regime.

And what Ukraine has today – a year and a half after the coup? On July 27 the Constitutional Court started to hear a law on decentralization of power. A day before, the chairman of the court, Yuri Baulin, was injured in a car accident. So, he was unable to chair the hearing. The Interior Ministry investigated the case and found guilty Baulin’s driver, but Interior Minister Avakov refused to say if it was an accident or not. He said it was not important.

After the scandals involving the Tornado and Aidar defense battalions, it turned out that the “defenders of Ukraine” were not as good as they were believed to be. After the Mukachevo incident - when the authorities faced armed terrorists thousands miles away from the war zone – people saw that Ukraine was no longer a legal state but a country full of armed bands, who not only ignored the existing laws but were even trying to impose their own laws. In fact, the Right Sector is currently attempting to create “a state inside a state,” with an own economy based on misused national resources and an own army consisting of criminals.

Today, the Right Sector has its own armed forces – something termed as a crime in Ukraine’s Constitution. Even more, shortly before Mukachevo, it announced plans to enlarge its army. And the Right Sector is not alone. There are also Tornado and Aidar, who have already proved their criminality. Racket, raiding, smuggling and trafficking in persons are just a daily ordeal. They also have a more “romantic” pastime, involving some very exotic practices, like raping people before camera or subjecting prisoners to medieval tortures and BDSM experiments. Well aware of all this, the authorities keep threatening to disband those gangs, but they are still alive and well armed.

One more example of illegality was the “election” in Chernihiv’s district 205. That vote had nothing to do with constitution as it involved all the practices of the pre-Maidan times: thugs for hire, carousel voting, stuffing, terror, bribery, mud-slinging. Even President Petro Poroshenko admitted that the election was illegal - though Poroshenko’s interview was also illegal as it was given on the eve of the voting. But this is normal for Ukraine. Everybody knew the winner before the voting even started as one of the candidates was Poroshenko’s man. But nobody complained. People are silent, Themis is blind, journalists are corrupt.

And this is not all. Unlike the ballot in Chernihiv, the Communist Party of Ukraine is quite legal, but they in Kyiv are doing their best to illegalize it. And they have found a way to do it: a few days ago Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko announced that the Communist Party could no longer be part of politics in Ukraine as there was a law on decommunization. It was one more bow to Europe. But calls for Eurointegration are already beginning to sound as a joke – for even the administrative police organized by Poroshenko and Avakov are not legal. Just imagine – guards of law are illegal! The point is that the law on police has not been ratified by the President and has not been published in the Holos of Ukrayiny daily. Nor are police mentioned in the law on militia. This is one more illegality. But mass media are not reacting to it. In fact, they ignore all illegalities happening in their country.

One more example: volunteer Georgy Tuka has been appointed as Governor of Lugansk region. Poroshenko introduced Tuka as his protégée. But his biography is not very clear. The website of the Lugansk Regional Administration gives no personal information about Tuka, while the biography given by mass media has a gap from 1986 till 2009. And no single journalist or lawyer has cared to find out what Tuka was doing during that period. I did and I know that Tuka was part of an organized criminal group and was engaged in smuggling. Tuka is also the author of the Peacemaker website, where - quite illegally - he has published a list of “public enemies” with their addresses and phone numbers. I have looked through the list and have found Oles Buzina and Oleh Kalashnikov there. According to Tuka, 300 more people from that list have been killed. So, according to the Criminal Code and the Constitution of Ukraine, Tuka is a criminal, more specifically, an organizer of mass killings. And there are lots of other such criminals freely moving all over Ukraine with arms and certificates in hand.

This article will hardly suffice me to give all the proofs that Ukraine has become a territory of chaos and anarchy. Sometimes, the law is observed – but only for “public enemies,” like journalists Kotsab and Buzila, like activist Vera Shevchenko, like Ihnat Kramskiy, who are all in jail, like thousands of other people. The Communist Party will no longer be able to run in elections. The Party of Regions is being persecuting. Mass media and people are witnessing all this but keep silent.

Maxim Ravreba, journalist, blogger, specially for EADaily