Hammer-wielding nationalists storm town council meeting in Kiev suburbs (VIDEOS)
Far-right radicals in Ukraine stormed a city council meeting last week, wearing masks and armed with bats and hammers.
A group of nationalist-radical group ‘Right Sector’ broke into a City Council meeting where members of the Party of Regions were sitting in the town of Vasilkov, outside the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
Armed members of the group entered, hinting that members of the Party of Regions should “voluntarily” resign. This was after admitting that they just invaded another local meeting, where they had successfully got other elected members of the Party of Regions to resign. The members replied that they had already done so that morning.
The radical group was led by far-right activist Igor Mosiychuk, who was sentenced to six years in prison in January for planning to blow up Lenin’s monument in the town of Borispol. He is also one of the three suspects in the ‘Vasilkov’s terrorists’ case.
Mosiychuk was freed from jail on February 24 based on Ukraine’s parliament newly-approved decree to release political prisoners.
The Right Sector movement, a combination of several far-right groups, was formed in November 2013 soon after the anti-government protests in Ukraine began. Their leader is Dmitry Yarosh. Members of the radical movement were active in the events leading to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovich.
Released 'political prisoner' threatens to send armed nationalists to Crimea
While the radicals in the main try to remain unrecognized, hiding their faces behind masks, Igor Mosiychuk - aka Moisha – does not bother to conceal his identity. He poses himself as a staunch nationalist and a leader of the Patriots of Ukraine, one of few groups aligned with the Right Sector, in the city of Vasilkov.
Until his arrest in August 2011 – along with Sergey Bevz and Vladimir Shpara - he was a member of Vasilkov town council and editor-in-chief of the local newspaper.
In this video from 2010 found on Youtube, he is seen messing around with guns to the sound track of a famous cartoon about gangsters.
Locals recall that since the Patriots of Ukraine appeared in the city on the eve of the elections to the town council, everything changed for the worse, media reports claimed. The “Patriots” allegedly put heavy pressure, including threats and physical violence, on other candidates demanding that they withdraw from the elections. The video below shows Mosiychuk and his colleague running over a woman in their car, amid chaotic scenes of a crowd protesting election results, which they say were falsified.
After his release from jail, Moisha (always wearing a t-shirt with Wolfsangel, the neo-Nazi sign used by some SS divisions during World War II) is often seen in Vasilkov, accompanied by his heavily armed fellow nationalists.
Right after being granted freedom “as a political prisoner”, Moisha continued his “political activity.” He appeared on Ukrainian TV sharing his group’s ideology and threatening “harsh punishment” to those who try to split Ukraine.
He vowed to send the so-called “trains of friendship” to Crimea, full of armed fighters, if there is a threat of separatism on the part of the Autonomous republic.
"If the government is not able to do that then Right Sector will create "the train of friendship". Wewill go to the Crimea, just like in the 90th UNSO [a Ukrainian far-right organization], when people, like these rats, were running away, as a column of UNSO entered Sevastopol," he said.
