At Least 10 Opposition Figures Have Died in Ukraine Just This Year
Source: The Nation
At Least 10 Opposition Figures Have Died in Ukraine Just This Year
The spate of murders and suspicious suicides does not bode well for Ukraine’s democracy.
James Carden
April 21, 2015
Journalist Oles Buzyna was shot dead in Kiev by two masked gunmen. (Reuters/Stringer)
Excerpt:
Fast forward almost two months and shift the scene southwest from Moscow to Kiev. On April 15, Oleg Kalashnikov, a former Rada deputy and member of the deposed President Victor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was shot to death in his home. Since the Maidan coup of February 2014, Kalashnikov had emerged as a vocal opponent of the American-backed government; indeed, Kalashnikov had been active in organizing a series of anti-government protests known as the Antimaidan.
According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kalashnikov had written to friends that his life had been threatened because of “his calls to celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory in the ‘Great Patriotic War.’” Echoing Vladimir Putin’s comments following Nemtsov’s assassination, Ukrainian oligarch-turned President, Petro Poroshenko was quick to call Kalashnikov’s murder a “provocation” that was aimed at “destabilizing the internal political situation in Ukraine and discrediting the political choice of the Ukrainian people.”
The day after Kalashnikov’s death, April 16, another political murder took place in Kiev, this time in broad daylight. At 1:20pm in the afternoon the Ukrainian opposition journalist Oles Buzyna was gunned down outside his home. Buzyna, invariably described as a “pro-Russian journalist” was, like Kalashnikov, active in anti-government circles. Immediately following the event, the Ukrainian Interior Minister noted Buzyna’s murder may have been "orchestrated by Russia” in order to "destabilize the situation in Ukraine from within.”
More troubling still, the murders of Kalashnikov and Buzyna are only the latest in a series of murders or suspicious “suicides” that have decimated the ranks of the Ukrainian opposition. Beginning on January 26th with the death of the former deputy chief of Ukrainian Railways, Nikolai Sergienko, no fewer than 10 opposition politicians and journalists have been killed in the span of just under three months.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/204921/least-10-opposition-figures-have-died-ukraine-just-year
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And for good measure:
Not at all.
Nope.
