Since Ukrainian citizens are discriminated because of their ethnic origin - there is discrimination even on the level of laws in this country (see here) – it is obvious that there must be additional means of suppression in Ukraine, i.e. in addition to police, army, secret service etc.
Such functions of additional suppression are performed by Ukrainian nationalist groups whose members call themselves “activists”, but, de facto they play the same role in Ukraine as death squads in Latin America.
Death squads are described in Wikipedia in the following way:
A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. Except in rare cases where they are formed by an insurgency, domestic or foreign governments actively participate in, support, or ignore the death squad's activities.
...Other violence, such as rape, torture, arson, or bombings may be carried out alongside murders. They may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary militia groups, government soldiers, policemen, or combinations thereof. They may also be organized as vigilantes. Death Squads
As a rule, such groups operate secretly in their countries but Ukrainian death squads have a distinctive feature - there is a special website, which is called Myrotvorets (see here), in Ukraine and this website coordinates activities of Ukrainian death squads by publishing lists of so-called “enemies of Ukraine” and their personal information.
The site Myrotvorets continues to function despite repeated requests from the UN, G7 ambassadors, the EU and human rights groups to close it down.
Below you can find some examples of actions of Ukrainian death squads – I have chosen the infamous crimes, which had been committed more than 5 years ago, but no culprits have been found so far.
- Death of more than 40 opponents of Ukrainian rulers in a fire in Odessa’s Trade Unions House in May 2014.
- Assassination of a former parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov in 2915 (see here) shortly after his name and his home address had been published by the above-mentioned website Myrotvorets.
- Murder of the opposition journalist and writer Oles Buzina (see here) who was shot dead one day after Oleg Kalashnikov’ assassination – Oles Buzina’s name and home address had been published by the website Myrotvorets some days before his death, too.
- Murder of Iurii Grabovskii in 2016 who defended in court a Russian citizen A. Aleksandrov who was accused of terrorism in Ukraine; Grabovskii was abducted and then a video was posted in Internet in which Grabovskii refused to defend Aleksandrov; after that Grabovskii was shot dead and his body was buried.
Main feature of death squads is secrecy of their actions but several times there were some evidence of these actions in Ukraine.
Case of Serhii Khodiiak
In 2016, members of the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported about an attempt to try Serhii Khodiiak who was accused of having shot Evgenii Losinskii – an opponent of Ukrainian rulers - to death in Odessa in 2014 (see the UN Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine).
Members of the above-mentioned Mission witnessed how dozens of “activists” behaved aggressively toward the panel of judges and the prosecutor who were trying the Khodiiak’s case. And no wonder that Khodiiak was later acquitted. And, of course, no murderer of Evgenii Losinskii has been found.
Arson of rooms of TV company Inter in 2016
In 2016, a website accused the TV company Inter of cooperation with separatists; dozens of “activists” rushed into the building, where this TV company is situated, and set its rooms on fire - fortunately, nobody died in this arson.
Later that day, Advisor to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko – who is suspected of promoting the above-mentioned website Myrotvorets (see here) - wrote in Facebook that one shouldn`t rule out that managers of Inter themselves had provoked arson of their rooms, see here.
So far, no culprits of this arson have been found; and by the way, so far, Ukrainian authorities haven’t published any confirmation that Inter had really cooperated with separatists. i.e. no criminal proceedings have been started because of these allegations.
Difference between Ukraine and law-based states
When we consider law-based countries, we can see that only the state has the right to punish “enemies of the people” there.
For example, the U.S. federal laws and laws of some states provide that some crime – e.g. treason or espionage - are capital crimes, see here.
But such cases are investigated by police, courts etc., not by “activists”.
Assassinations of opposition figures can happen in law-based countries too, but authorities of these countries always pay special attention to investigation of such crimes so that nobody could suspect these authorities of involvement in these assassinations.
For example, after Stanislav Markelov, a Russian opposition lawyer, had been shot to death in Moscow in 2009 (see here), his murderer – a leading member of Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists (MORN) - was sentenced to life imprisonment already in 2011. Another leader of MORN was arrested in Serbia in 2013, deported to Russia and together with two other members of MORN was sentenced to life imprisonment too.
But the situation in Ukraine is absolutely different – after each assassination of an opposition figure the Ukrainian rulers declare that the investigation will be under their special monitoring but very often such crimes remain unsolved.
Therefore, it is clear why ordinary Ukrainian citizens very seldom criticize their government, for example, before TV cameras – it is easy to get into a list of “enemies of the people” for such criticism and get a visit from “activists” for it.
There are opposition politicians in Ukraine, but as a rule they are rich businessmen who have their bodyguards for protection.
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