History book on Ukrainian Neonazism released in Belgium
A presentation of a book investigating the bloody events in Kiev, that resulted in an armed power shift in Ukraine and started in February this year, took place in Belgium today.
The title of the book is "Neonazis & Euromaidan:
From Democracy to Dictatorship". Its authors are political analyst of
the CIS-EMO international organisation for elections observation
Stanislav Byshok and the president of the Public Diplomacy Foundation
Alexey Kochetkov. They submitted their book at a seminar of members of
communist parties held in the Belgian town of Louvain-la-Neuve near
Brussels.
"We
are often asked if we consider the former Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych's regime democratic, but this is not the point. We show how
people's protest under originally democratic slogans was completely
controlled and monopolized by Neonazis who alone took advantage of the
Euromaidan victory. This book is an attempt to trace how Ukrainian
nationalism separated the nation and plunged it into chaos instead of
uniting the people," Kochetkov told journalists.
"The
book contains a lot of quotations of those people who are in power in
today's Ukraine and their ideological predecessors. We give translations
of big fragments of their programmes and plenty of information about
their activities," Byshok said.
The book shows the
evolution of Ukrainian radical nationalist groups from 1991 until today.
The emphasis is put on the history of the Right Sector and the Svoboda
(Freedom) party which was the Social-National Party of Ukraine before
2004. Their ideology, mentality and methods of political struggle are
scrutinized.
"Any revolution uses ideas predominant in
society for its positive program. Those were left-wing radical ideas in
the Russian Empire of 1917, radical Islamism in the Arab countries
during the Arab Spring in 2010. As for Ukraine of 2013-2014, this was
radical nationalism that swallowed the Euromaidan's originally
democratic and pro-European aims," the authors believe.
This
is the second English-language edition of the book. It was also
published in Russian with a title "Euromaidan in Honour of Stepan
Bandera: From Democracy to Dictatorship".
The presentation of the book will take place in Paris on 5 July, Berlin on 7 July and Warsaw on 11 July.
The
presentation of the book in Belgium was held on the next day after
Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko signed a final economic agreement on
association and free trade with the EU.
