Since Jan. 19, pitched battles have raged on Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv, during which time Ukraine’s Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said that police were not in possession of firearms.
“The charges against law enforcement agencies are all unfounded, since on Hrushevskoho Street they have no firearms,” the prime minister said.
And yet, scores of images filling the front pages of newspapers and internet sites prove otherwise. Special Interior Minister troops alongside Berkut riot police have been photographed and recorded firing shotguns indiscriminately into crowds of protesters, journalists and medical volunteers.
“He (Azarov) is a liar,” said Igor, a 43-year-old businessman who declined to give his last name for fear of facing prosecution by authorities under strict new anti-riot laws punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Igor spoke to the Kyiv Post moments after a solid brass slug had whizzed past him and hit his friend in the thigh. The man slumped over and cried out in pain as medical staff carried him away to be checked.
Igor’s outrage is shared by many who have spent more than two months participating in anti-government EuroMaidan protests who feel that President Viktor Yanukovych and other officials have not been truthful.
To be fair, hundreds of militant protesters have hurled Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones at police, and at least two were photographed holding pistols.
But scores of pictures showing shotgun shells, rubber and metal pellets as well as solid projectiles purportedly fired by riot-control police have been widely shared on social media after being recovered by doctors, journalists and activists.
So Azarov’s silence on the matter since was taken by protesters such as Igor to mean that he’d lied, or simply did not know or care after at least two activists died of gunshot wounds, suffering fatal injuries from live rounds.
Prosecutors confirmed on Jan. 22 that the men were shot with live ammunition, and said they have opened a criminal investigation to determine who was responsible.
The Interior Ministry on Jan. 23 conceded that the men were killed after being shot by metal rounds, but insisted, based on investigators’ findings, that the incidences were “murder to provoke an escalation of the conflict and justify the use of weapons of protesters.”
“The ammunition that caused injuries to both those who perished are not used by police officers… And for Interior Ministry troops who serve to protect public order there are no standard-issue firearms,” said Vitaly Sakal, deputy chief of the Interior Ministry’s investigation department.
The Interior Ministry also misled the public, to put it mildly, in the kidnapping of activists Igor Lutsenko and Yuriy Verbytsky. Police initially denied that the two men had been forcibly taken from a Kyiv hospital by a group of pro-government hired thugs. Officials said the two men walked out on their own.
However, more than 10 hours later, Lutsenko surfaced, confirming that they had been kidnapped and taken by their captors to a forest outside Kyiv, where they were put into separate cells inside an abandoned garage. Before they released him, they forced him on his knees and demanded that he say a prayer.
He thought he was going to say “goodbye to life” a “minimum of three times in the last 24 hours,” he wrote in a post on Facebook.
Verbytsky wasn’t as fortunate. A day later his body turned up in Boryspil, a Kyiv suburb.
More untruths, experts say, came with the slew of new anti-protest laws. Similar laws, Azarov and members in government argue, are already in place in Europe. A memo shared with Western ambassadors during a meeting this week and leaked to the Kyiv Post shows the Ukrainian government pushing this line.
“For example, in Germany, there are criminal penalties for masking one’s face, wearing helmets, shields, etc. during mass events… and in the United States, Canada and other countries,” reads the memo, titled “Comparative Analysis: Laws of some foreign countries.”
But while these laws exist on paper, lawyers say they are rarely – if ever – applied in practice.
And it was a lie, many Ukrainians say, which spurred the protest movement back in November. After months of promises, Yanukovych backed out of a long-awaited deal with the European Union that would have deepened ties between Ukraine and the EU. Instead, Yanukovch opted for a $15 billion Russian bailout and cheaper Russian gas.
Oleg Rybachuk, a public activist and leader of New Citizen public campaign, said the betrayal of government promises “brought people to the streets.”
“It needed to come to this,” he said in November.
Speaking to the Kyiv Post on Jan. 22, Rybachuk, who has played a prominent role in mobilizing civil society, said that he was fed up with the country’s leaders and no longer recognized them.
In spite of the government and the strict new protest laws, he said he would don a helmet for the first time on since protests began. “I will wear a helmet because we no longer recognize this government, this dictatorship,” he said.
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected].
